The availability of ideal randomness is a common assumption used not only in cryptography, but in many other areas of computer science, and engineering in general. Unfortunately, in many situations this assumption is highly unrealistic, and cryptographic systems have to be built based on imperfect sources of randomness. Motivated by these considerations, this project will investigate the validity of this assumption and consider several important scenarios where secure cryptographic systems must be built based on various kinds of imperfect randomness.
This project investigates the feasibility of cryptography with imperfect sources of randomness, and whether ideal randomness is necessary for building various cryptographic primitives. These techniques will be applied to the area of leakage-resilient cryptography. Namely, we consider a realistic attack scenario where the adversary can gain partial knowledge of some secret information. This project will design novel protocols which are resilient to such leakage of partial information.
