This award will support the dissemination of Dr. Liskov's research on symmetric cryptography, which was supported previously by award CNS-0845662. In particular it will pay for his graduate student to travel to the IACR Theory of Cryptography Conference and to the Eurocrypt Conference. In addition to supporting the timely dissemination of cryptographic research, the award will provide valuable educational experiences and training for a young scientist close to the completition of his Ph.D.
This grant was awarded to provide travel funding for David Goldenberg. David Goldenberg was a PhD student when his advisor left academia in December 2009. This funding was used to back up his request to travel to Zurich for TCC 2010 in order to present a joint paper, "On Related-Secret Pseudorandomness." Abstract: Related-key attacks are attacks against constructions which use a secret key (such as a blockcipher) in which an attacker attempts toexploit known or chosen relationships among keys to circumvent securityproperties. Security against related-key attacks has been a subject ofstudy in numerous recent cryptographic papers. However, most of theseresults are attacks on speci?c constructions, while there has been littlepositive progress on constructing related-key secure primitives.In this paper, we attempt to address the question of whether related-keysecure blockciphers can be built from traditional cryptographic primitives. We develop a theoretical framework of "related-secret secure"cryptographic primitives, a class of primitives which includes related-keysecure blockciphers and PRFs. We show that while a single related-secretpseduorandom bit is su?cient and necessary to create related-key secureblockciphers, hard-core bits with typical proofs are not related-secretpsuedorandom. Since the pseudorandomness of hard-core bits is the essential technique known to make pseudorandomness from assumptions ofsimple hardness, this presents a very strong barrier to the developmentof provably related-key secure blockciphers based on standard hardnessassumptions. Unfortunately, David was unable to attend due to his flights being cancelled during the Blizzard of 2010, but the funding did allow him to be officially registered for the conference and to receive conference proceedings and be on the list of participants. Though this grant had other funding available for other travel needs, none arose before David graduated with his PhD in early May, 2010.
