Project description
Advancing symmetric cryptography for secure applications
Data digitisation plays a pivotal role in modern life, with vast amounts increasingly stored in the cloud. Symmetric cryptography, particularly AES and Keccak/SHA-3, is essential for securing this data. However, progress in performance and security has stagnated. Existing bit-oriented schemes are inadequate for critical applications, such as format-preserving encryption, multi-party computation, zero-knowledge and fully homomorphic encryption. Addressing these limitations requires innovative approaches for designing secure and efficient symmetric primitives. The ERC-funded SYMPZON project aims to develop strategies for designing and guaranteeing the security of symmetric cryptographic primitives over integer rings. This will lead to advanced revolutionary symmetric primitives with improved security and performance, tailored for a growing range of rising applications.
Objective
Our lives are profoundly affected by the digitization of data, and the amount of sensitive data that is shared on cloud storage grows considerably every day.
Whenever sensitive data is collected, manipulated, exchanged, analyzed, and retained, symmetric cryptography is used.
The most commonly used and famous symmetric cryptography algorithms are AES and Keccak/SHA-3.
Due to their importance, the entire research community focuses its attention on such schemes, with the result that the great majority of the symmetric primitives recently published resemble them.
While positive at first glance, the limits of this approach and of the current state of the art are appearing in several contexts.
First, the similarity of such schemes caused a performance flatness, with no substantial improvement recently achieved.
Next, our understanding of their security has not fundamentally improved in the course of the last years, since their security arguments are still based on unverified and often false assumptions.
Finally, and more importantly, the current bit-oriented schemes are *not* suitable for rising applications of practical importance such as Format Preserving Encryption, Multi-Party Computation, Fully Homomorphic Encryption, and Zero-Knowledge, which naturally operate over prime fields and/or integer rings.
The only way we can overcome these fundamental problems is by considering non-standard innovative approaches for designing secure and efficient symmetric primitives.
Within the SYMPZON project, I plan to reshape the whole process of designing symmetric primitives by
- developing design strategies for defeating attacks against symmetric primitives that mainly operate over integer rings;
- constructing new cryptographic components over integer rings that admit an efficient bit-representation.
This will lead to revolutionary symmetric primitives dedicated to targeting the rising number of applications operating over rings, with unprecedent security arguments and performances.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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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.
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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.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-STG
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5612 AE Eindhoven
Netherlands
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