Crypto 2011, Santa Barbara, CA

I’m presently at the ongoing Crypto 2011 conference which is, like every year, taking place in the Campbell Hall of UCSB. So far, everything has been super-fantastic including the meals in the very known De La Guerra cafeteria. Last night we were present at the famous crypto rump session which is one of the mostly viewed live crypto meetings, because it is webcast live every year. The most exciting talk at this year’s rump session is probably the  announcement of the key-recovery attack on the full AES, with complexity lower than the brute-force, by Bogdanov, Khovratovich and Rechberger. The improvement is marginal — at most by a factor of 3. However, note that they are the first attacks on the full-round AES without any related-key assumption. The paper is here.

Among other talks, that I could at least understand,  one of them is the meet-in-the-middle attack on IDEA by Eli Biham, Nathan Keller, Orr Dunkelman and Adi Shamir. If I remember correctly, the attacks require work equivalent to more than 200 bits, but they are certainly better than the brute-force. Adi Shamir also busted GOST, in his talk GOSTBUSTER 2. The subject of the talk is not at all funny like the title; in fact it is quite the opposite: Attacks were reported on the russian crypto-system GOST.

Yuji Suga talked about many sponge-like constructions. This work tallies very much with our present research. Yuji’s presentation was fabulous. People rolled on the floor laughing, as he trots out his slides one by one. I believe it had taken Yuji a lot of hard work and time to prepare a presentation like this.

Last but not the least, I also presented our (Dustin Moody and I) new results on the hash function modes of operation FWP and JH. The slides are here. The full paper will be available as soon as possible. The presentation was one of the worst for me. I could not actually finish off the slides, way behind schedule, and sort of booed away by the audience. But, as always, it was great fun also to be honked off the podium, as the spirit of the audience was never rude as it may seem from my description; on the contrary it was quite affectionate. I hope those who watched the live broadcast would have already known that.

The list of all talks is here. But they have not yet uploaded the slides. Check back later.

Postscript: If you think you will be able to learn about the proceedings of a conference just by managing to buy the so called “conference-proceedings”, you are pitifully wrong. One of the major gains of attending this year’s crypto is to know a very interesting anagram for the phrase “the codebreakers”. Any idea what the anagram could be? Oh. This reminds me that David Kahn was honored with IACR fellowship this year for his outstanding contribution to the crypto-community. The citation is here. Other new IACR fellows are: Richard Schroeppel, Scott Vanstone and Charles Rackoff. The webpage.

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