Cryptography Under Counterintuitive Settings
Abdullah Talayhan
Abstract: In this talk, we will explore several primitives that sounds counterintuitive at first to solve several practical problems. First such example is hiding a public key (which is something that is supposed to be public) in a public ledger setting to achieve post-quantum security. The second example is contrary to the first, in which we try to delegate our private key (or a cryptographic action) to some other agent (like a power of attorney) but we still maintain control on how our private key is used by using a primitive called digital consent. The third example is making anonymous tokens non-transferrable. For a token to be non-transferable, intuitively, they must be bind to an identity. Hence it is not a common property for anonymous tokens. Lastly, we will explore the technical details of one of the main primitives that exists in all above constructions which is zero-knowledge proofs and we will discuss the current open problems in this space.
Bio: Abdullah Talayhan is a PhD Student in Computer science at EPFL working under the supervision of Prof. Serge Vaudenay. He is currently interested in the security of digital signatures and zero-knowledge proofs. Previously, he earned his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Bilkent University in 2020. During his bachelor studies, he worked with Serge Vaudenay on Post-Quantum Cryptosystems with Prof. Serge Vaudenay and Attribute Based Signatures with Prof. Alptekin Küpçü. He is also independently interested in designing open access publication mechanisms and he is the founder and maintainer of Ask Cryptography, a platform the discuss cryptography research papers.
DATE: January 27, Monday @ 13:30
Place: EA 409