Tutorial: Code-Based Cryptography

Session chair(s):

Mitsugu

Iwamoto

Presenter

Sven

Puchinger

Technical University of Munich, Germany

Antonia

Wachter-Zeh

Technical University of Munich, Germany

Abstract

Currently-used public-key cryptosystems based on number-theoretic problems are threatened by the possibility that large-scale quantum computers will be built in the near future; Shor’s algorithm is able to solve these seemingly hard problems in polynomial time on such computers. In this context, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has initiated a standardization process for public key encryption (PKE) schemes, key encapsulation mechanisms (KEM), and signatures. The standardization process has now reached Round 3, where lattice-based and code-based cryptography play a prominent role. These code-based cryptosystems include most prominently the classical McEliece system. Their security is based on hard computational problems in coding theory, and encryption and decryption often correspond to en- and decoding of an error-correcting code.

The goal of this tutorial is to provide an overview of important existing code-based cryptosystems, their security, and current challenges in the area of code-based cryptosystems. We will thereby consider amongst others systems based on Goppa, Moderate-Density-Parity-Check (MDPC), and rank-metric codes.

Biography

Sven Puchinger

Sven Puchinger (S’14, M’19) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany. He received the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering and the B.Sc. degree in mathematics from Ulm University, Germany, in 2012 and 2016, respectively. During his studies, he spent two semesters at the University of Toronto, Canada. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Institute of Communications Engineering, Ulm University, Germany, in 2018. He has been a post-doc at the Technical University of Munich (2018–2019 and since 2021) and the Technical University of Denmark (2019–2021), Denmark. His research interests are coding theory; its applications to cryptography, network coding, and distributed data storage; and related computer-algebra methods

Antonia Wachter-Zeh

Antonia Wachter-Zeh (S’10–M’14-SM’20) is an Associate Professor at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Munich, Germany in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering She received the M.Sc. degree in communications technology in 2009 from Ulm University, Germany. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in 2013 from Ulm University and from Universite de Rennes 1, Rennes, France. From 2013 to 2016, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, and from 2016 to 2020 a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at TUM. She is a recipient of the DFG Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Preis and of an ERC Starting Grant. She is currently an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Her research interests are coding theory, cryptography and information theory and their application to storage,communications, privacy, and security.