Workshop 2009
Block ciphers and their security

Scientific investigation into security properties is often neglected, except for very specific attacks, such as differential cryptanalysis.
With “provable security” we mean that fascinating branch of cryptography that tries to identify security criteria for ciphers.
With this workshop we aim at providing some related approaches.

Quoting Claude Shannon (1949)
The problem of good cipher design is essentially one of finding difficult problems, subject to certain other conditions.

Quoting Jim Massey (2004)
The most commonly used definition today in cryptography (but not many cryptographers would admit it) of a hard problem is:
This is a hard problem: no one has been able to solve this problem.
My favourite definition: A hard problem is one that nobody works on.
Essentially there has been zero progress toward provable computational security in both secret-key and public cryptography.
Today almost no one works on the scientific problem of developing provably computationally-secure systems!

Massimiliano Sala 09.00-09.30, ---> On translation-based cryptosystems and their security Sala's slides

Andrea Caranti 09.30-10.00, ---> On translation-based cryptosystems and the alternating group Caranti's slides

Anna Rimoldi 10.00-10.45, ---> A related-key distinguishing attack on the full AES128 an abstract of Rimoldi's slides

Coffee Break 10.45-11.15,

Ludovic Perret 11.15-12.00, ---> Computer Algebra and Cryptography Perret's slides