Mathematics of Information-Theoretic Cryptography

February 28 - March 4, 2011

Overview

This 5-day workshop explores recent, novel relationships between mathematics and information-theoretically secure cryptography, the area studying the extent to which cryptographic security can be based on principles that do not rely on presumed computational intractability of mathematical problems.

Recently, there has been a surge in interactions between this area and several areas in mathematics, mainly algebraic geometry and number theory, coding theory, combinatorics, and probability theory. This is an exciting, promising state of affairs. However, these developments are still taking place in largely disjoint scientific communities, such as CRYPTO/EUROCRYPT, STOC/FOCS, Algebraic Coding Theory, and Algebra and Number Theory, and advances and challenges that arise in one community may go unnoticed in a different yet relevant community.

The primary goal of this workshop is to bring together the leading international researchers from these communities, in order to establish a shared view on information-theoretic cryptography as a source of motivation for old and new problems in these areas and to foster collaboration across boundaries. Concretely, we aim at experts from such areas as randomness extraction, list-decoding, locally decodable/testable codes, towers of algebraic function fields, algebraic coding theory, matroid theory, and information-theoretically secure protocol theory. There will be presentations disseminating the latest developments concerning this bridge function of cryptography and the latest technical results within the relevant mathematical areas. In addition, many survey talks will be featured.

Organizing Committee

Ronald Cramer (CWI Amsterdam & Mathematical Institute, Leiden University)
Yuval Ishai (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology)
Tali Kaufman (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Carles Padro (Nanyang Technological University)
Chaoping Xing (Nanyang Technological University)