Today, the security of our digital world fundamentally relies on modern cryptography – from the secrecy and privacy of our personal e-communication to the integrity and authenticity of our e-commerce and e-government transactions. To guarantee the security of our e-society, cryptographic systems must undergo meticulous cryptanalytic scrutiny.
A well-known cryptanalysis technique is algebraic attacks, in which the cryptographic scheme is modeled as a system of non-linear polynomial equations. Solving the system reveals the secret key or the secret message, thus completely breaking the security of the scheme. Although algebraic methods have been around for a long time, usually the attacks involve generic solvers for systems of equations that do not take specific constraints and properties into account. This often results in overestimating the complexity of the algebraic attack and thus overestimating the security of schemes for which algebraic methods are one of the best possible approaches.
This project will develop dedicated and fine grained algebraic methods for cryptanalysis, that will be used particularly for evaluation of the security of post-quantum schemes. They are currently undergoing international standardization with global cryptanalytical efforts and are expected to replace the current standards in less than a decade.
