Dachman-Soled Receives NSF EAGER Grant for Post-Quantum Indifferentiability

Assistant Professor Dana Dachman-Soled (ECE/UMIACS/MC2) is the principal investigator for a new one-year, $100,000 National Science Foundation EAGER grant, Post-Quantum Indifferentiability. Current technology for securing Internet traffic relies on two types of cryptosystems: "public key" and "symmetric key." Shor's algorithm in 1994 showed that currently used public key cryptosystems (which are based on the factoring or discrete log assumptions) are broken by quantum attack. Importantly, while outright attacks may not be known for most symmetric key cryptosystems, classical proof techniques for analyzing symmetric key cryptosystems---such as the so-called "indifferentiability framework"---do not carry over to the quantum setting. The goal of this project is to develop new tools for the security analysis of symmetric key, post-quantum cryptosystems by means of a quantum analogue of the indifferentiability framework.

“I am very excited to continue my work on post-quantum cryptography. The question of whether symmetric key cryptosystems are secure in the presence of quantum computers is a crucial question that has not received enough attention from the research community,” says Dachman-Soled. “My work will help to determine the security status of commonly used symmetric-key cryptosystems as we move to the post-quantum era.”

The EAGER funding supports exploratory work in its early stages on untested, but potentially transformative, research ideas or approaches.

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