What are some interesting topics in Cryptography?

ninguem · 1 year

Elliptic curve cryptography.

jan · 1 year

Authentication, Web of Trust vs Hierarchical Certificates

Practical security: How does your mom know, her banking is secure? What should the bank do, to make this easy for her? What do banks really do?

Show that Quantum Key Distribution is useless (or the opposite).

How comes most of your classmates, friends, professors have never sent or received an encrypted email? What the hell goes wrong? Don't they have any secrets, expectation of privacy?

Tor? Freenet? Wikileaks? Anonymous (hidden) networks? Connection with revolutions in the middle east?

Some history? WW2?

industrialwaste · 1 year

you might want to crosspost this to /r/crypto

AthierThanThou · 1 year

Just slinging ideas here:

Can zero-knowledge proofs be used as an identity authentication factor? I.e., can you prove who you are without revealing possibly sensitive information about yourself that a third party man-in-the-middle could use to impersonate you?
Is the bitcoin algorithm secure? Does it really respect anonymity and non-repudiation? Can it be expanded so that one user can use multiple computers?
Speaking of non-repudiation, is that really possible to achieve? Is there some way to ensure that if I digitally sign something, there is at most an arbitrarily small chance that I could ever in the future plausibly say that "someone stole my key and/or password"?

OlderThanGif · 1 year

A practical fully homomorphic encryption system would blow my mind if it could be developed. This would allow computation to happen on ciphertext. E.g., you could upload your data, encrypted, to a compute server or cloud computing service or something like that and perform computations on it without ever having to decrypt it. Further, it couldn't be determined what computations you were actually doing.

There was a theoretical fully homomorphic encryption system developed using ideal lattices a while back, I remember, but it couldn't be used for practical use. I think I remember reading an interview with the author who said that if you were to try to apply it to something like performing a search on Google (where all the databases were encrypted), it would take decades or perhaps even centuries on modern computer hardware to complete a query.

Cheesejaguar · 1 year

There is a principle on which some cryptographic measures designed such that no computer with the theoretical maximum computing power the entire earth could ever break them using brute force. You could write a paper explaining the physics behind these, and why it's a good or a bad idea for a cryptographically secure design. You could argue either way.

Though seriously my dad works in cryptography... you should see some of the key sizes businesses use to protect important stuff. It's kind of a joke at that point. Cryptographic keys in the megabyte range.

gimballock2 · 1 year

cryptocurrency see bitcoin

ivosaurus · 1 year

quantum.

spazzm · 1 year

Perhaps looking into the work done in proving lower bounds of the time complexity on factorising almost-prime integers?

englishnomad · 1 year

For part of my mathematics degree, I talked briefly about the history of cryptography and then used Maple to program an algorithm to encrypt and decrypt using these ciphers.

I started with the basic Caesar Shift Cipher, then moved on to the Hill Cipher, and finally RSA.

wootfish · 1 year

Most of the stuff being suggested here is pretty cutting-edge and fun, but if you need something standard, I've always found cryptographic hash function design to be particularly stimulating.

electronics-engineer · 1 year

How about cryptographically strong systems that don't use computers? There have been several attempts with playing cards, pencil and paper, etc.

bgbeuning · 1 year

The Afterword by Matt Blaze (pages 619 to 621) in "Applied Cryptography" by Schneier lists some open topics.

My favorite open topic is "how do programs trust other programs without human intervention". For example, a web server has an SSL certificate and for security a certificate has a pass phrase. No one puts a pass phrase on a server cert because that means if the server reboots, someone needs to enter the pass phrase.

mkawick · 1 year

Just a few ideas.

Its an interesting branch of mathematics in the field of Modern Algebra.

AES is basically uncrackable. There's a nice little story about how the Brazillian authorities and the FBI tried to break the encryption of a hard drive and failed

Worth noting, some of the best encryption schemes are simple XOR hashes. (very fast, hard to decrypt by anyone except an expert) The mechanism is about as simple as it gets.

You might mention quantum encryption.

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