NYU Cryptography Group

at Courant Institute
Students:
Faculty: Nelly Fazio
Yevgeniy Dodis Michael Freedman
dodis@cs.nyu.edu Anca Ivan
Victor Shoup
Antonio Nicolosi
shoup@cs.nyu.edu
Roberto Oliveira
Shabsi Walfish
Cryptography Reading Group

Meet every week

This semester Friday, 1pm, room 101
Drop by!
Contact me to be put on the mailing list

http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/crypto
 Our Main Goals
Improving the security and/or efficiency
of cryptographic applications
Designing new, provably secure
cryptographic primitives
Formalization and rigorous analysis of
common cryptographic practices
Protecting against key exposure
Secure distributed/multiparty computation
Our Style: Provable Security
Formal definition for the cryptographic task at
hand
A concrete scheme which provably satisfies the
above definition, assuming some commonly
believed and well studied mathematical problem
is hard
Ensures that the only way to break the
cryptographic scheme is to break a well studied
mathematical problem, which is very unlikely
(e.g., factoring)
Gives much higher guarantee/assurance than
commonly utilized heuristic approaches
 Crypto Skills
Creativity: open mind, love for puzzles

Formalism (proofs!) and elementary

math (number theory, probability)

Ability to ask interesting questions

as a devil
Ability to think
 Some of Our Projects
Signature and Encryption Schemes
Authenticated Encryption
Resilience to Key Exposure
Distributed and Multi-party Cryptography
Two-party computation
Digital Right Management
Cryptography with Imperfect Randomness
Ideal Hash Function Methodology
Fault-tolerant Authentication
Privacy and Anonymity
 Some projects I have
been involved in @ NYU
Warnings:
Not meant to
give formal introduction to cryptography
be crystal clear if you see it for the first time
Instead
give vague summary of the kind of things I like
emphasize joint works with students and faculty
Talk to me if interested in details!
 Partial Key Exposure
"Exposure-Resilient Functions and All-Or-
Nothing Transforms" , Eurocrypt, 2000.

"On Perfect and Adaptive Security in

Exposure-Resilient Cryptography", Eurocrypt,
2001.

"Exposure-Resilience for Free: the Case of

Hierarchical ID-based Encryption", IEEE
International Security In Storage Workshop
(SISW), 2002.
 Key Evolving Schemes
Designed new model of key-insulated
security, led to intrusion-resilient security

"Key-Insulated Public Key Cryptosystems",

Eurocrypt, 2002.

"Strong Key-Insulated Signature Schemes",

Workshop on Public Key Cryptography (PKC),
2003.
"Intrusion-Resilient Public-Key Encryption",
RSA Conference, Cryptography Track (CT-
RSA), 2003.
 Two-Party Schemes
Max Krohn, David Mazieres and Antonio
Nicolosi, "Proactive Two-Party Signatures for
User Authentication", Network and Distributed
System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2003.

Anca Ivan, "Proxy Cryptography Revisited",

Network and Distributed System Security
Symposium (NDSS), 2003.

"Generic Two-party CCA-secure Encryption

Scheme and its Applications", manuscript
 Authenticated Encryption
"On the Security of Joint Signature and
Encryption", Eurocrypt, 2002.
"Concealment and Its Applications to
Authenticated Encryption", Eurocrypt, 2003.
Michael Freedman and Shabsi Walfish, "Parallel
Signcryption with OAEP, PSS-R and other
Feistel Paddings", submitted to Crypto 2003.
Michael Freedman and Shabsi Walfish,
"Universal Padding Schemes", manuscript.
"Parallel Authenticated Encryption", manuscript.
 Digital Right Management
Nelly Fazio, "Public Key Broadcast Encryption for
Stateless Receivers", ACM Workshop on Digital
Rights Management, 2002.
Nelly Fazio, "Public Key Broadcast Encryption
Secure Against Adaptive Chosen Ciphertext
Attack", Workshop on Public Key Cryptography
(PKC), 2003.
Nelly Fazio, "Fully Scalable Public-Key Traitor
Tracing", submitted, 2003.
Nelly Fazio, "Forward-Secure Broadcast
Encryption", manuscript.
 Imperfect Randomness
"New Imperfect Random Source with
Applications to Coin-Flipping",
International Colloquium on Automata,
Languages and Programming (ICALP), 2001.
Joel Spencer, "On the (non-)Universality of
the One-Time Pad", Foundations of
Computer Science (FOCS), 2002.

Roberto Oliveira, "On Extracting Private

Randomness over a Public Channel",
manuscript.
 Distributed Cryptography
"Parallel Reducibility for Information-
Theoretically Secure Computation",
Crypto, 2000.

"Efficient Construction of (Distributed)

Verifiable Random Functions", Workshop
on Public Key Cryptography (PKC), 2003

Distributed Block Ciphers", manuscript

 Cryptography: Other
"Lower Bounds for Oblivious Transfer
Reductions", Eurocrypt, 1999.

"A Cryptographic Solution to a Game

Theoretic Problem", Crypto, 2000.

"On the Power of Claw-Free

Permutations", Conference on
Security in Communication Networks
(SCN), 2002
 Algorithmic Game Theory

Can moderate taxes force selfish users

minimize global traffic and congestion?

Richard Cole, "Pricing Network Edges for

Heterogeneous Selfish Users",
Symposium on Theory of Computing
(STOC), 2003.
Richard Cole, "The Cost of Taxes for
Selfish Routing", ACM Conference on
Electronic Commerce (EC), 2003.
 My Other Interests
Algorithms: randomized and approx.
algorithms, network design
Coding Theory: relates to crypto too
Complexity Theory: derandomization
Combinatorics and Graph Theory
Anything else that has proofs and
requires problem solving
Recap of some recent
group activities
 Signature & Encryption
First provably secure and yet efficient
signature and encryption schemes
[CS98, CS99, CS02]
lead to new standards for PKI
Efficient schemes utilizing ideal hash
functions [Sho00, Sho01, DR02, DFW03,
DFJW03]
Signature / encryption schemes with
extended functionalities [CS03, DF03,
NKDM03]
Authenticated Encryption
First formal modeling of public-key
authenticated encryption (signcryption)
[ADR02]
Parallel authenticated encryption
[ADR02, DFW03, DFJW03, Dod03a]
Designing authenticated encryption for
long messages [DA03]
 Key Exposure Protection
Exposure-resilient functions and All-
or-nothing transforms [CDH00, DSS01]
Key-insulated signature and encryption
scheme [DKXY02, DKXY03]
Intrusion-Resilient Encryption [DKY03]
Remotely-Keyed Encryption [DA03]
Server-Aided/Proxy/Proactive
Cryptography [NKDN03, ID03, DY02]
 Distributed Computation
Byzantine Agreement [CKS00, CKPS01,
KS01]
Threshold Cryptosystems [SG98,Sho00]
Distributed verifiable random functions
and block ciphers [Dod03b, DY03]
Joint generation of special RSA keys
[ACS02]
Two-party computation [NKDN03, ID03]
Concurrent protocols composition [DM00]
 Some Other Projects
Digital right management [DF02,
DF03, DFKY03]
Ideal Hash Function Methodology
[Dod03b, DS03]
Basing Cryptography on Imperfect
Randomness [DS02, DO03]
Cryptography and Game Theory
[DHR00]