Project description
Cryptography: aligning theory with practice
To date, there is a large discrepancy between the theoretical and practical aspect of cryptography. The EU-funded REWORC project aims to narrow this gap. To achieve it, it will lay the theoretical foundation for real-world cryptography and develop new tools and models for the design and analysis of practical cryptography in the post-quantum setting, amongst other things. The work of the project will have a long-term impact on theoretical protocol design, influence ongoing standardisation efforts in post-quantum cryptography and settle doubts about the security of important cryptography used in practice.
Objective
Almost half a century after the invention of public-key cryptography, there is still a vast discrepancy between
the theory and practice of cryptography. With some notable exceptions, research from the cryptographic theory
community focuses on problems of great theoretical interest, albeit completely disconnected from the real world. On the other hand, widely used real-world cryptographic protocols are being neglected because they are either mathematically ugly, their solutions appear uninteresting, or they simply do not cross the mind of theoreticians. The current state can be summarized as follows:
• Several well-established theoretical cryptographic concepts fall short from properly modeling the way practitioners think about real-world cryptography
• There exists a surprisingly large amount of modern cryptographic primitives and standards with unclear provable security status.
The central objective of the REWORC project is thus to narrow the gap between theory and practice of cryptography, providing a solid theoretical groundwork for real-world cryptography. To this end, we will
• lay a new theoretical foundation for real-world cryptography in the elliptic curve setting
• develop new tools and models for the design and analysis of practical cryptography in the post-quantum setting
• revisit the concrete security of legacy cryptography from the 2000s, recently established standards, and forthcoming standards.
REWORC will have a substantial long-term impact on theoretical protocol design, influence ongoing standardization
efforts in post-quantum cryptography, and settle doubts about the security of important cryptography
used in practice.
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-AG - HORIZON Action Grant Budget-BasedHost institution
44801 Bochum
Germany