S. Dziembowski: Cryptography on Non-Trusted Machines
(preliminary page)
 

The course given at the Open lectures for PhD students in computer science series, Warsaw University, December 2008 - January 2009.

DESCRIPTION


We will give an introduction to a new area of cryptography, called "cryptography on non-trusted machines". The goal of this area is to design cryptographic schemes that are secure even if implemented on not-secure devices. This is motivated by an observation that most of the real-life attacks on cryptographic devices do not break their mathematical foundations, but exploit vulnerabilities of their implementations. This concerns both the cryptographic software executed on PCs, that can be attacked by viruses, and the implementations on hardware that can be subject to the side-channel attacks (such attacks are based, e.g., on measuring the power consumption, electromagnetic radiation, or time needed to perform a given operation).

We will not assume any prior knowledge of cryptography.  Hence, the first part of the course (that will take place in December) will be devoted entirely to the introduction to cryptography, with an emphasis on provable security (to save time we will discuss only private key cryptography). 

In the second part (that will take place in January) we will discuss the main topic of the course ("cryptography on non-trusted machines").  This part will be based on the following papers:
  1. S. Dziembowski
    Intrusion-Resilience via the Bounded-Storage Model
    Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC) 2006

  2. S. Dziembowski and K. Pietrzak
    Intrusion-Resilient Secret Sharing
    FOCS 2007

  3. S. Dziembowski and K. Pietrzak
    Leakage-Resilient Cryptography
    FOCS 2008

  4. D. Cash, Y. Z. Ding, Y. Dodis, W. Lee, R. J. Lipton, and S. Walfish.
    Intrusion-Resilient Key Exchange in the Bounded Retrieval Model.
    Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC 2007),

  5. Y. Ishai, A. Sahai, and D. Wagner. Private Circuits:
    Securing Hardware against Probing Attacks.
    CRYPTO 2003


PREREQUISITES

Basic knowledge of complexity theory and probability theory.

   

  Reading resources (for the first part of the course):
  1. Main book: Jonathan Katz and Yehuda Lindell Introduction to Modern Cryptography

  2. Other texts:



 
Slides:   [ppt, pdf]

  Homework:   [pdf]. Please send the solutions (in pdf, scanned documents are ok) to std-phdopen@mimuw.edu.pl. The official deadline for delivering the homework is 31.01.09. It is strongly recommended, however, that the students start solving the problems before the second session of the course (16.01-17.01), since it may help in understanding the lecture.