Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Privacy and security are two obvious necessities of modern life. Yet, when it comes to protecting digital data, these are new concepts that are still not well understood. The invention of public-key cryptography in 1978 made such endeavours become a reality, so that now we have a practical way of performing securely many electronic tasks where a proof of identity is essential. Signatures, authentications, key agreements are nowadays part of our daily electronic life, be it in an online transaction or when withdrawing money from an ATM. Still many problems remain, also because hackers have increasingly more sophisticated attacks. In this line of thought, we require from the public-key primitives that perform these tasks that they achieve a standard level of security, with the fastest possible implementation. My research involves speeding up these computational implementations through the use of elliptic curves, which are now faster than RSA. In another direction I will also investigate the security of elliptic curves and make sure that nobody can produce "phony curves" which are easily crackable.