Cryptology: The Road Ahead

Abstract

Cryptology is an essential building block for any IT security solution. In the past decades, cryptology has evolved from a secret art to a modern science. In the 1990ies, cryptology was the subject of intense political debate on issues such as export controls, key escrow and crippled security solutions. Moreover, cryptographic operations were expensive and hard to implement. In the last few years, political controls of cryptography have diminished substantially, weak algorithms are disappearing, and secure and efficient cryptography is becoming more and more a commodity. This may lead to the belief that the cryptography problem is “solved.” However, this talk will show that there are still many challenging problems ahead of us. We will discuss the increasingly powerful attacks on implementations that are based on side channels, faults and errors, but also the more fundamental problems such as the conjectured difficulty of factoring and the progress of quantum computers.

About Bart Preneel

Bart Preneel is a professor at the Electrical Engineering Department of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and visiting professor at the T.U.Graz in Austria. Together with Prof. J. Vandewalle, he is heading the research group COSIC at the K.U.Leuven, which currently has 35 members. He has held visiting professor positions at the Ruhr-Univ. Bochum (Germany), at the Univ. of Bergen (Norway) and the Univ. of Ghent (Belgium). He has also been a research fellow at the EECS Department of the University of California at Berkeley.

His main research interests are cryptology and information security. He has authored and co-authored more than 140 articles in international journals and conference proceedings and is editor of seven books. He is Vice President of the International Association of Cryptologic Research (http://www.iacr.org), Chairman of the Leuven Security Excellence Consortium (http://www.l-sec.be) and he has been project manager of the European IST projects NESSIE and STORK; for the NESSIE project he has received the 2003 European Information Security Award in the area of academic research. He is currently project manager of the Network of Excellence on Cryptology ECRYPT (http://www.ecrypt.eu.org) which brings together more than 250 researchers. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Cryptology and of the ACM Transactions on Information Security. In 2004, he received an honorary Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) designation by the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA). He has extensive expertise in standardization and more than 15 years of experience in consulting for the IT and financial industry.