Final Report Summary - FSC (Fast and Sound Cryptography: From Theoretical Foundations to Practical Constructions)
The FSC project involved the investigation of the feasibility of fast cryptographic primitives with supporting proofs of security, along with the benefits of having algebraic structure in such constructs (both in terms of efficiency and in terms of functionality). The theoretical justification for security relies on the theory of point lattices, as well as on the study of local functions (and the theory behind the computational complexity of functions computable by low-depth circuits).
The project has achieved all of its objectives in full, and went even further in studying and introducing new notions and concepts that were non-existent and/or not conceivable at the time of the writing of the proposal. Within the scope of the project's objectives, new constructions of fast lattice-based primitives such as pseudorandom functions have been analyzed and devised, and both software and hardware implementations have been developed, reaching speeds as fast as 4X times slower than AES (in software) in CTR mode. The project also analyzed the security of one of its main underlying hardness problems (called Learning With Rounding - LWR), based on the well known learning with errors (LWE) problem.
As mentioned above, the project has additionally produced results beyond its initial scope, relating to newly introduced concepts and notions that were not foreseen at the time of the proposal's writing, and took center stage in the cryptographic research community as the project evolved. These include indistingushability obfuscation, game theoretic analysis of cryptographic protocols, algebraic non-malleable commitments, fine-grained cryptography, and function secret sharing. The latter four notions were introduced in the course of working within the FSC project.
The project has achieved all of its objectives in full, and went even further in studying and introducing new notions and concepts that were non-existent and/or not conceivable at the time of the writing of the proposal. Within the scope of the project's objectives, new constructions of fast lattice-based primitives such as pseudorandom functions have been analyzed and devised, and both software and hardware implementations have been developed, reaching speeds as fast as 4X times slower than AES (in software) in CTR mode. The project also analyzed the security of one of its main underlying hardness problems (called Learning With Rounding - LWR), based on the well known learning with errors (LWE) problem.
As mentioned above, the project has additionally produced results beyond its initial scope, relating to newly introduced concepts and notions that were not foreseen at the time of the proposal's writing, and took center stage in the cryptographic research community as the project evolved. These include indistingushability obfuscation, game theoretic analysis of cryptographic protocols, algebraic non-malleable commitments, fine-grained cryptography, and function secret sharing. The latter four notions were introduced in the course of working within the FSC project.