CWI Cryptology Group

Abstract: The rapid adoption of digitalization in almost all aspects of economic activities has led to serious concerns in security, privacy, transparency and fairness issues of digitalized systems. These issues will result in negative impacts on people’s trust in digitalization, which need to be addressed in order for organizations to reap the benefits of digitalization. The typical value proposition of digitalization such as elevated operational efficiency through automation and enhanced customer services through customer analytics require the collection, storage and processing of massive amount of user data, which are typical cause for data governance issues and concerns on cybersecurity, privacy and data misuses. AI-enabled processing and decision-making also lead to concerns on algorithm bias and distrust in digitalization. In this talk, we will brief review the motivation of digitalization, discuss the trust issues in digitalization, and introduce the emerging areas of Trust Technology which is a key enabler in developing and growing the digital economy.

Abstract: Combinatorics has been playing an active role in cryptography, from the designs of cryptographic constructions, security proofs to cryptanalysis. Combinatorial cryptography refers to a sub-field of cryptography where combinatorics and cryptography are interacted significantly. In this talk, I will present several concrete examples to illustrate how combinatorial objects and techniques are applied to the constructions of cryptographic schemes such as in secret sharing, threshold cryptography and secure multiparty computation.