Speaker Bjoern Tackmann, ETH Zurich
Date and Room Thursday, Oct 24th, 3pm/ 4549 Boelter Hall
Title Constructive Cryptography -- Introduction and Applications
Abstract

Constructive cryptography is a paradigm for defining security which has been introduced by Maurer and Renner in the context of the abstract cryptography framework. The underlying idea of constructive cryptography is that one understands a protocol as a construction of a desired resource (e.g. a secure channel) from one or more assumed resources (e.g. an insecure channel and a shared key). Advantages of this approach are the clear semantics of the resulting security statements and the strong compositionality which allows for a modular protocol design and proof.

The talk starts with an introduction to the constructive cryptography paradigm, and shows how one obtains security definitions in the context of secure communication, focusing on public-key encryption. The talk will also sketch the relation to previous definitions that are based on other paradigms such as game-based security or UC.