Dachman-Soled Receives Grant to Continue Research on Post-Quantum Cryptosystems

Assistant Professor Dana Dachman-Soled (ECE/UMIACS/MC2) has received a one-year, $76,914 award from Cisco Systems, Inc. titled, “Faithfulness, Side-Channels, and Anonymity in Lattice-Based Cryptosystems.” The award will support her research on the robustness of "post-quantum" cryptosystems.

Unlike traditional ones, these cryptosystems remain secure even in the presence of a universal quantum computer. While there is a strong effort in the community to validate the basic security claims of these mechanisms (i.e. that the encrypted message remains hidden), less effort has been dedicated to validating other desirable security properties. One question to be explored by this project, is the ease/difficulty with which a “backdoor” in the encryption algorithm can be created — i.e. an implementation that transmits information about the encrypted message in an undetectable way to a designated party possessing some secret information. Other questions to be investigated include determining whether the anonymity of a party generating a public key or encrypting a message is compromised due to small deviations in the implementation of the algorithms.

“I am very pleased that Cisco has continued to fund my research for the third year,” says Dachman-Soled. “I am looking forward to continuing to extend my work with the crypto and hardware security teams at Cisco.”

Published January 8, 2019