Charles River Crypto Day @ MIT

MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing is pleased to announce
a day-long workshop surveying recent developments in
cryptography and computer security. The event will feature
invited talks by Florian Tramer (ETH Zurich), Salil Vadhan
(Harvard), and Nadia Heninger (UC San Diego). In addition, MIT
faculty member Srini Devadas and three MIT PhD students (Noah
Golowich, Alexandra Henzinger, and Seyoon Ragavan) will give an
overview of research activity in these areas on campus.

The event is open to the public, so please share this invitation
widely. *Please register at the link below so that we can make
sure that there is enough coffee and food for everyone.*

~~~ Logistical Information ~~~

Date: Thursday, January 30, 2025
Time: 9:30 am–4:30 pm

Location:
MIT Building 45, 8th Floor
51 Vassar Street
Cambridge, MA 02139

Please register here:
https://forms.gle/BRjVYFrkuS9ym9VM9

~~~ Program ~~~

9:30-10:30am:
Srini Devadas (MIT): “Designing Hardware for Cryptography and Cryptography for Hardware”

10:30-11:00am: Coffee break

11.00am-12.00pm: Invited talk
Salil Vadhan (Harvard): “Multicalibration: a New Tool for Security Proofs in Cryptography”

12.00-1.30pm: Lunch (provided)

1.30-3.00pm: MIT Student Talks

1.30-2.00pm: Noah Golowich: “Edit Distance Robust Watermarking”
2.00-2.30pm: Alexandra Henzinger: “Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption from Sparse LPN”
2.30-3.00pm: Seyoon Ragavan: “Factoring with a Quantum Computer: The State of the Art”

3.00-3.30pm: Coffee break

3.30-4.30pm: Invited talk
Nadia Heninger (UC San Diego): “Cryptanalynomics”

~~~ Abstracts for Hour-Long Talks ~~~

Title: “Designing Hardware for Cryptography and Cryptography for Hardware”
Speaker: Srini Devadas (MIT)

Abstract:
There have been few high-impact deployments of hardware
implementations of cryptographic primitives. We present the
benefits and challenges of hardware acceleration of
sophisticated cryptographic primitives and protocols, and
describe our past work on accelerating fully homomorphic
encryption. We argue the significant potential for synergistic
codesign of cryptography and hardware, where customized hardware accelerates cryptographic protocols that are designed with we present hardware acceleration in mind. As a concrete example, a new design of a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) accelerator 
that leverages hardware-algorithm co-design to generate proofs 
500 times faster than a 32-core CPU.

This work was done in collaboration with Simon Langowski, Nikola
Samardzic, and Daniel Sanchez.

***

Title: "Multicalibration: A New Tool for Security Proofs in Cryptography"
Spaker: Salil Vadhan (Harvard)

Abstract:
In this talk, I will describe how Multicalibration, a new
concept arising from the algorithmic fairness literature, is
a powerful tool for security proofs in cryptography. 
Specifically, the Multicalibration Theorem of
[HébertJohnson-Kim-Reingold-Rothblum `18] asserts that every
boolean function g, no matter how complex, is
"indistinguishable" from a "simple" randomized function. 
Specifically, there is a "low-complexity" partition of the
domain of g into a small number of pieces such that on almost
every piece P_i, if we choose an input X uniformly at random
from P_i, (X,g(X)) is computationally indistinguishable from
(X,Bernoulli(p_i)), where p_i is the expectation of g on P_i. 
As shown by [Dwork-Lee-Lin-Tankala `23], this is
a complexity-theoretic analogue of Szemeredi's Regularity Lemma
in graph theory, which partitions the vertex set of every graph
G into a small number of pieces P_i, such that on almost all
pairs P_i x P_j, the graph G is, in a certain sense,
indistinguishable from a random bipartite graph with edge
density matching that of G on P_i x P_j.

The Multicalibration Theorem allows us to reduce many questions
about computational hardness and computational
indistinguishability to their information-theoretic analogues. 
Thus, it can be viewed as a qualitative strengthening of several
complexity-theoretic results that were already known to have
many applications to security proofs in cryptography, such as
Impagliazzo's Hardcore Lemma [Impagliazzo `95, Holenstein `06],
the Complexity-Theoretic Dense Model Theorem
[Reingold-Trevisan-Tulsiani-Vadhan `08], and the Weak
Complexity-Theoretic Regularity/Leakage Simulation Lemma of
[Trevisan-Tulsiani-Vadhan `09, Jetchev-Pietrzak `14]. In
particular, we show that these latter results all follow easily
as corollaries of the Multicalibration Theorem. Furthermore, we
also use it to obtain new results characterizing how many
samples are required to efficiently distinguish two
distributions X and Y in terms of their
"pseudo-Hellinger-distance" (or the "pseudo-Renyi-1/2 entropy"
of X in case Y is uniform).

Joint works with Sílvia Casacuberta and Cynthia Dwork and with
Cassandra Marcussen and Louie Putterman.

***

Title: "Cryptanalynomics"
Spaker: Nadia Heninger (UC San Diego)

Abstract:
This talk is a meditation on the current state of cryptanalysis
research in public-key cryptography. I will explore the
incentives for and against cryptanalysis in the academic
community, and how this is reflected in the current state of
classical and post-quantum cryptanalysis research. This
discussion is informed by my own experience, as well as
a pseudorandomly chosen selection of unscientific personal
discussions with a variety of researchers across our community.