Georgia Tech Information Processing, Communications and Security (IPCAS) Research Lab Research Lab

Cryptography and Network/Communications Security Developments in the computer and communication technology have brought a new dimension to the Information Age. Real-time exchange of information regardless of location and distance has greatly increased both the pace of business and the number of ways in which we communicate. The widespread availability and transmission of such information demands new approaches in cryptography. The objective is to build secure and reliable networks out of less secure and less reliable resource constrained devices. Our work spans the range from theoretical cryptography to applications; including significant research efforts in development of new cryptographic primitives, cryptanalysis, and applications from wireless and ad-hoc (sensor) networks to delay-tolerant (DTN) and space-time networks.

 

Public Key Cryptography | Wavelet Cryptography Random Key Pre-distribution | Authentication/Availability Trust and Reputation Systems | Recommendation Systems

 

Multivariate Public Key Cryptography

It is very desirable to have practical cryptosystems based on problems other than the handful of NP-hard assumptions (the difficulty of the discrete logarithm and factorization) currently in use. This way we would be in a safer state against possibilities such as the emergence of an efficient algorithm for factoring or computing discrete logs. Therefore, the prohibitive cases of common security solutions for resource limited devices, on the one hand, and the need for cryptosystems based on other NP-hard problems, on the other, motivated us to propose cryptosystems using paraunitary transforms. Our research at Georgia Tech has shown that multivariate cryptography based on paraunitary transforms over finite fields promises a framework for new approaches to cryptography (which relies on the NP-hard problem of solving systems of polynomial equations). This framework has combined the ease of analysis and low computational complexity of paraunitary transforms with the security of multivariate cryptography to obtain a new paraunitary public-key scheme that is particularly realizable on constrained devices. Such a framework has great potential to provide secure and efficient solutions to other problems such as digital signatures, and hash functions.