Author Archives: Ralf

About Ralf

Currently Postdoctoral researcher in the LACS group at the University of Luxembourg.

ECRYPT PhD summer school

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The following announcment just in from several mailing lists. I attended the summer school two years ago and have to say that it was definitely worthwile! Mark your calendars if you’re a PhD student working in the field of cryptology and are interested in cryptanalysis.

Emerging Topics in Cryptographic Design and Cryptanalysis

30 April – 4 May, 2007
Doryssa Seaside Resort – Samos, Greece
http://ecrypt-ss07.isg.rhul.ac.uk


 

Following the great success of the ECRYPT PhD Summer School on
Cryptanalysis in 2005, the Symmetric Techniques and Asymmetric Techniques
Virtual Laboratories are pleased to announce a new joint Summer School on
Emerging topics in Cryptographic Design and Cryptanalysis. Covering
selected topics in both symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, this summer
school will provide a thorough overview of some of the most important
cryptographic design and cryptanalysis techniques that have emerged in
recent years. While the summer school is aimed primarily at postgraduate
students, attendance is open to all.

The ECRYPT Summer School on Emerging Topics in Cryptographic Design and
Cryptanalysis will take place at the Dorissa Seaside Resort, in Samos,
Greece, from April 30th to May 4th, 2007.

The Summer School will cover the following topics:

  • Design and Cryptanalysis of Hash Functions

  • Design and Cryptanalysis of Stream Ciphers

  • Pairing-based Cryptography

  • Gröbner Bases techniques in Cryptography

Preliminary list of speakers

Olivier Billet, France Télécom R&D
Bruno Buchberger, RICAM
Anne Canteaut, INRIA
Carlos Cid, Royal Holloway, University of London
Christophe De Cannière, K.U. Leuven
Jean-Charles Faugère, LIP6/INRIA
Thomas Johansson, Lund University
Lars Knudsen, DTU – Technical University of Denmark
Tanja Lange, TU Eindhoven
Benoît Libert, UCL Crypto Grouo
Christof Paar, Ruhr University Bochum
Kenny Paterson, Royal Holloway, University of London
Ludovic Perret, UCL Crypto Group/LIP6
Bart Preneel, K.U. Leuven
Christian Rechberger, T.U. Graz
Michael Scott, Dublin City University
Nicolas Sendrier, INRIA
Jacques Stern, Ecole Normale Supérieure

Stipends

A limited number of stipends will be available for students from
non-ECRYPT institutions. Please let us know before April 2nd if you are
interested, by sending a mail to:

Carlos Cid
Information Security Group
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham, Surrey
TW20 0EX
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)1784 414685
carlos.cid [AT] rhul.ac.uk

and

Ludovic Perret
Crypto Group
UCL
Louvain-la-Neuve
Belgium
Tel: +32 (0) 10 47 22 84
ludovic.perret [AT] uclouvain.be

SFLASH fully broken

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Vivien Dubois (ENS), Pierre-Alain Fouque (ENS), Adi Shamir (Weizmann & ENS), and Jacques Stern (ENS) have broken SFLASH. SFLASH is a multivariate signature scheme designed by Nicolas Courtois, Louis Goubin and Jacques Patarin. It is recommended in the final report of the NESSIE project; albeit only for resource-constrained devices. The article does not seem to be public yet, its title is Cryptanalysis of the SFLASH family of signature schemes (excerpt from ECRYPT newsletter):

We are able to break all C*- schemes.
[…]
It allows to forge a signature for an arbitrary message in a few minutes for practical parameters, using only the public key. The attack has been fully implemented and can break SFLASH v2 which has been accepted by NESSIE, as well as SFLASH v3 which has been also proposed by the designers.

This result was also announced by Jacques Stern during the ASIACRYPT 2006 rump session on December 5th, 2006. Rest in Peace, C*-.