The Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research (CACR) is a group of industrial representatives, professors, and students at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada who work and do research in the field of cryptography.
The University of Waterloo is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on 404 hectares of land adjacent to "Uptown" Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university offers academic programs administered by six faculties and ten faculty-based schools. The university also operates three satellite campuses and four affiliated university colleges. Waterloo is a member of the U15, a group of research-intensive universities in Canada. The University of Waterloo is most famous for its cooperative education (co-op) programs, which allow the students to integrate their education with applicable work experiences. The university operates the largest post-secondary co-operative education program in the world, with over 20, 000 undergraduate students in over 140 co-operative education programs.
Waterloo is a city in Ontario, Canada. It is the smallest of three cities in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, and is adjacent to the city of Kitchener.
Ontario is one of the 13 provinces and territories of Canada and is located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province accounting for 38.3 percent of the country's population, and is the second-largest province in total area. Ontario is fourth-largest jurisdiction in total area when the territories of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut are included. It is home to the nation's capital city, Ottawa, and the nation's most populous city, Toronto, which is also Ontario's provincial capital.
The CACR aims to facilitate leading-edge cryptographic research, to educate students at postgraduate levels, to host conferences and research visits, and to partner with various industries. It was officially opened on June 19, 1998.
Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and an end in obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many applications ranging from logic to statistical physics, from evolutionary biology to computer science, etc.
Computer science is the study of processes that interact with data and that can be represented as data in the form of programs. It enables the use of algorithms to manipulate, store, and communicate digital information. A computer scientist studies the theory of computation and the practice of designing software systems.
Mathematics includes the study of such topics as quantity, structure, space, and change.
The CACR plays a part in many conferences and workshops, including the following:
Selected Areas in Cryptography (SAC) is an international cryptography conference held every August in Canada since 1994. The first workshop was organized by Carlisle Adams, Henk Meijer, Stafford Tavares and Paul van Oorschot. Through 1999, SAC was hosted at either Queen's University or Carleton University, but starting in 2000, locations have ranged across Canada. SAC has featured research presentations on many cryptographic topics, with a traditional focus on the design and analysis of block ciphers. SAC is regarded as a high-quality venue for presenting cryptographic results, and is the only cryptography conference held annually in Canada. Since 2003, SAC has included an invited lecture called the Stafford Tavares Lecture, in honor of one of its original organizers and strongest supporters.
Scott A. Vanstone was a mathematician and cryptographer in the University of Waterloo Faculty of Mathematics. He was a member of the school's Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research, and was also a founder of the cybersecurity company Certicom. He received his PhD in 1974 at the University of Waterloo, and for about a decade worked principally in combinatorial design theory, finite geometry, and finite fields. In the 1980s he started working in cryptography. An early result of Vanstone was an improved algorithm for computing discrete logarithms in binary fields, which inspired Don Coppersmith to develop his famous exp(n^{1/3+ε}) algorithm.
Alfred Menezes is co-author of several books on cryptography, including the Handbook of Applied Cryptography, and is a professor of mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Neal I. Koblitz is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington. He is also an adjunct professor with the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research at the University of Waterloo. He is the creator of hyperelliptic curve cryptography and the independent co-creator of elliptic curve cryptography.
Elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) is an approach to public-key cryptography based on the algebraic structure of elliptic curves over finite fields. ECC requires smaller keys compared to non-EC cryptography to provide equivalent security.
A cypherpunk is any activist advocating widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change. Originally communicating through the Cypherpunks electronic mailing list, informal groups aimed to achieve privacy and security through proactive use of cryptography. Cypherpunks have been engaged in an active movement since the late 1980s.
Ronald Linn Rivest is a cryptographer and an Institute Professor at MIT. He is a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He was a member of the Election Assistance Commission's Technical Guidelines Development Committee, tasked with assisting the EAC in drafting the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines.
Daniel Julius Bernstein is a German-American mathematician, cryptologist, and programmer. He is a Personal professor in the department of mathematics and computer science at the Eindhoven University of Technology, as well as a Research Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Paulo S. L. M. Barreto is a Brazilian cryptographer and one of the designers of the Whirlpool hash function and the block ciphers Anubis and KHAZAD, together with Vincent Rijmen. He has also co-authored a number of research works on elliptic curve cryptography and pairing-based cryptography, including the eta pairing technique, identity-based cryptographic protocols, and the family of Barreto-Naehrig (BN) pairing-friendly elliptic curves. More recently he has been focusing his research on post-quantum cryptography, being one of the discoverers of quasi-dyadic codes and quasi-cyclic moderate-density parity-check (QC-MDPC) codes to instantiate the McEliece and Niederreiter cryptosystems and related schemes.
The Faculty of Mathematics is one of six faculties of the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, offering over 500 courses in mathematics, statistics and computer science. The Faculty also houses the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, formerly the Faculty's computer science department.
Jennifer Roma Seberry is an Australian cryptographer, mathematician, and computer scientist, currently a professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She was formerly the head of the Department of Computer Science and director of the Centre for Computer Security Research at the university.
Victor Saul Miller is an American mathematician at the Center for Communications Research (CCR) of the Institute for Defense Analyses in Princeton, New Jersey, U.S. He received his A.B. in mathematics from Columbia University in 1968, and his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1975. He was an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics Department of the University of Massachusetts Boston from 1973 to 1978. In 1978 he joined the IBM 801 project in the Computer Science Department of the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and moved to the Mathematics Department in 1984. Since 1993 he has been at CCR.
The Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) is an affiliate scientific research institute of the University of Waterloo in located in Waterloo, Ontario with a multidisciplinary approach to the field of quantum information processing. IQC was founded in 2002 primarily through a donation made by Mike Lazaridis and his wife Ophelia whose substantial donations have continued over the years. The institute is now located in the Mike & Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre and the Research Advancement Centre at the University of Waterloo.
Paul C. van Oorschot is a cryptographer and computer security researcher, currently a professor of computer science at Carleton University, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Authentication and Computer Security. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC). He is best known as co-author of the Handbook of Applied Cryptography (ISBN 0-8493-8523-7), together with Alfred Menezes and Scott Vanstone. Van Oorschot was awarded the 2000 J.W. Graham Medal in Computing Innovation. He also helped organize the first Selected Areas in Cryptography (SAC) workshop in 1994.
Nigel Smart is a professor at COSIC at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He is also associated with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol. He is a cryptographer with expertise in the theory of cryptography and its application in practice.
Post-quantum cryptography refers to cryptographic algorithms that are thought to be secure against an attack by a quantum computer. As of 2018, this is not true for the most popular public-key algorithms, which can be efficiently broken by a sufficiently strong hypothetical quantum computer. The problem with currently popular algorithms is that their security relies on one of three hard mathematical problems: the integer factorization problem, the discrete logarithm problem or the elliptic-curve discrete logarithm problem. All of these problems can be easily solved on a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor's algorithm. Even though current, publicly known, experimental quantum computers lack processing power to break any real cryptographic algorithm, many cryptographers are designing new algorithms to prepare for a time when quantum computing becomes a threat. This work has gained greater attention from academics and industry through the PQCrypto conference series since 2006 and more recently by several workshops on Quantum Safe Cryptography hosted by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the Institute for Quantum Computing.
Niels Provos is a researcher in security engineering, malware, and cryptography. He received a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan. From 2003 to 2018, he worked at Google as a Distinguished Engineer on security for Google Cloud Platform. In 2018, he left Google to join Stripe as its new head of security.
Jonathan Katz is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences where he conducts research on cryptography and cybersecurity. In 2013 he became director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center at the University of Maryland.
Supersingular isogeny Diffie–Hellman key exchange (SIDH) is a post-quantum cryptographic algorithm used to establish a secret key between two parties over an otherwise insecure communications channel. It is analogous to the Diffie–Hellman key exchange, but is based on walks in a supersingular isogeny graph and is designed to resist cryptanalytic attack by an adversary in possession of a quantum computer. SIDH boasts one of the smallest key sizes of all post-quantum key exchanges; with compression, SIDH uses 2688-bit public keys at a 128-bit quantum security level. SIDH also distinguishes itself from similar systems such as NTRU and Ring-LWE by supporting perfect forward secrecy, a property that prevents compromised long-term keys from compromising the confidentiality of old communication sessions. These properties make SIDH a natural candidate to replace Diffie–Hellman (DHE) and elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDHE), which are widely used in Internet communication.
Hugh Cowie Williams is a Canadian mathematician. He deals with number theory and cryptography.
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