As the Internet emerges as the platform for computation, we have become increasingly reliant on cryptography to provide privacy and security in many of our day-to-day activities. We rely on cryptographic protocols to protect our credit card numbers from hackers in electronic transactions and our personal information from unauthorized access on online social networks. However, the design of many cryptosystems do not adequately account for new computational and cryptographic attacks made possible by advances in quantum computing and complex protocol interactions on the Internet. The focus of this project lies in the design and analysis of new cryptographic protocols that address these new attacks.
The research is centered around two goals: (1) to develop cryptosystems from large classes of intractability assumptions as viable alternatives to the widely-used factorization-based cryptosystems; (2) to obtain new techniques and efficient protocols secure against coordinated attacks amidst concurrent protocol executions.
This research is expected to develop ideas and techniques which hold the potential to bridge the gap between theory and practice in cryptography, and to fundamentally change the way we communicate, compute and collaborate. To ensure broader impact of this research, this project also encompasses a program of educational and outreach activities, including curriculum development (with an emphasis on new pedagogical approaches) as well as collaboration and regular exchanges with research institutions in the New York area and abroad.
