New Foundations for Real-World Cryptography

Introduction

Almost half a century after the invention of public-key cryptography, there is still a vast discrepancy between the theory and practice of cryptography. With some notable exceptions, research from the cryptographic theory community focuses on problems of great theoretical interest, albeit completely disconnected from the real world.

Current State of Cryptography

On the other hand, widely used real-world cryptographic protocols are being neglected because they are either mathematically ugly, their solutions appear uninteresting, or they simply do not cross the mind of theoreticians. The current state can be summarized as follows:

• Several well-established theoretical cryptographic concepts fall short from properly modeling the way practitioners think about real-world cryptography.
• There exists a surprisingly large amount of modern cryptographic primitives and standards with unclear provable security status.

Project Objective

The central objective of the REWORC project is thus to narrow the gap between theory and practice of cryptography, providing a solid theoretical groundwork for real-world cryptography. To this end, we will:

1. Lay a new theoretical foundation for real-world cryptography in the elliptic curve setting.
2. Develop new tools and models for the design and analysis of practical cryptography in the post-quantum setting.
3. Revisit the concrete security of legacy cryptography from the 2000s, recently established standards, and forthcoming standards.

Expected Impact

REWORC will have a substantial long-term impact on theoretical protocol design, influence ongoing standardization efforts in post-quantum cryptography, and settle doubts about the security of important cryptography used in practice.