Course Description

September 29-30, 2008 in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

by Ivan Damgard, University of Aarhus

The purpose of the course is to give an introduction to protocols that realize information theoretically secure cryptography between two or more distrusting parties.

- Introduction: Cryptography for mutually distrusting parties
  - possibilities and impossibilities
  - secure 2-party and multiparty computation (MPC)
- Bit commitment (BC) and Oblivious Transfer (OT), basic definitions and concepts
- Building BC and OT from noisy channels
- The unfair noisy channel
- BC and OT from unfair noisy channels
- Secure multiparty computation on secure point-to-point channels,
- Overview of known results for MPC
- Definition of Security, the UC model
- Secret Sharing
- MPC with Passive security
- MPC with Active security
- Alternative models: bounded storage and quantum information

References

Claude Crépeau, Joe Kilian: Achieving Oblivious Transfer Using Weakened Security Assumptions (Extended Abstract) FOCS 1988: 42-52

Charles H. Bennett, Gilles Brassard, Claude Crépeau, Ueli M. Maurer: Generalized privacy amplification. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 41(6):  1915-1923  (1995)

Ivan Damgård, Joe Kilian, Louis Salvail: On the (Im)possibility of Basing Oblivious Transfer and Bit Commitment on Weakened Security Assumptions.  EUROCRYPT 1999: 56-73

Claude Crépeau, Kirill Morozov, Stefan Wolf: Efficient Unconditional Oblivious Transfer from Almost Any Noisy Channel. SCN 2004: 47-59

Ivan Damgård, Serge Fehr, Kirill Morozov, Louis Salvail: Unfair Noisy Channels and Oblivious Transfer. TCC 2004: 355-373

Jurg Wullschleger: Oblivious Transfer from Weak Noisy Channels, Eprint
archive (www.iacr.org) report nr. 2008/420

Biography of the Instructor:

Ivan Damgard was born 1956 and received his PhD from University of Aarhus in 1984. He is now professor in Computer Science at University of Aarhus. 

He has held visiting positions at IBM Research New York and CWI Amsterdam. He was the IACR distingushed lecturer in 2006, and was program chair of EuroCrypt 1990 and ICALP 2008. He serves as associate editor of Journal of Cryptology. He is co-founder and co-owner of the Danish consulting and software company Cryptomathic. He has published 100+ papers in international conferences and journals. His main research interests are cryptography and IT security, more specifically security of cryptographic protocols, multiparty computation, public-key cryptography and quantum cryptography.

Registration

Registration is free but required by September 20, in order to organize the catering: www.tele.ucl.ac.be/musics/registration.php

Venue and timetable

The course will take place in MERCATOR 15 building (Place Louis Pasteur, 3 - Louvain-la-Neuve), from 9:30 to 17:30 on monday 29th and from 9:00 to 17:00 on tuesday 30th.

Accomodation

For Hotel Le Relais , please click on http://www.relais.ucl.ac.be/, for
Hotel Mercure, click on
http://www.accorhotels.com/accorhotels/fichehotel/fr/mer/2200/fiche_hotel.shtml