Fast and Sound Cryptography: From Theoretical Foundations to Practical Constructions

Objective

"Much currently deployed cryptography is designed using more “art'” than “science,” and most of the schemes used in practice lack rigorous justification for their security. While theoretically sound designs do exist, they tend to be quite a bit slower to run and hence are not realistic from a practical point of view. This gap is especially evident in “low-level” cryptographic primitives, which are the building blocks that ultimately process the largest quantities of data.

Recent years have witnessed dramatic progress in the understanding of highly-parallelizable (local) cryptography, and in the construction of schemes based on the mathematics of geometric objects called lattices. Besides being based on firm theoretical foundations, these schemes also allow for very efficient implementations, especially on modern microprocessors. Yet despite all this recent progress, there has not yet been a major effort specifically focused on bringing the efficiency of such constructions as close as possible to practicality; this project will do exactly that.

The main goal of the Fast and Sound Cryptography project is to develop new tools and techniques that would lead to practical and theoretically sound implementations of cryptographic primitives. We plan to draw ideas from both theory and practice, and expect their combination to generate new questions, conjectures, and insights. A considerable fraction of our efforts will be devoted to demonstrating the efficiency of our constructions. This will be achieved by a concrete setting of parameters, allowing for cryptanalysis and direct performance comparison to popular designs.

While our initial focus will be on low-level primitives, we expect our research to also have direct impact on the practical efficiency of higher-level cryptographic tasks. Indeed, many of the recent improvements in the efficiency of lattice-based public-key cryptography can be traced back to research on the efficiency of lattice-based hash functions."

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

• engineering and technology electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering electronic engineering computer hardware computer processors
• natural sciences computer and information sciences computer security cryptography
• natural sciences mathematics

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

• FP7-IDEAS-ERC - Specific programme: "Ideas" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

• ERC-SG-PE6 - ERC Starting Grant - Computer science and informatics

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

ERC-2012-StG_20111012
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

ERC-SG - ERC Starting Grant

Host institution

Beneficiaries (3)