Lightweight cryptography - when cryptography meets mathematics

Symmetric techniques are widely used because they are the only ones that can achieve some major features such as high-speed or low-cost encryption, fast authentication, and efficient hashing. It is a very active research area which is stimulated by a pressing industrial demand for low-cost implementations. In particular an important challenge raised by several new applications is the design of symmetric encryption schemes with extremely good implementation performance (low-cost hardware implementation, low latency,...). This demand is reflected by an open competition initiated by the NIST on lightweight symmetric encryption.

These harsh constraints encourage designers to search for optimized building-blocks in order to minimize the implementation cost. However, these optimized transformations often correspond to extremal mathematical objects with a very particular algebraic structure which may also introduce new vulnerabilities.

The talk is targeted towards a general mathematics and computer science audience.