Section: Overall Objectives

Presentation and scientific foundations

The research work within the project-team is mostly devoted to the design and analysis of cryptographic algorithms, in the classical or in the quantum setting. This work is essential since the current situation of cryptography is rather fragile. Many of the available symmetric and asymmetric primitives have been either threatened by recent progress in cryptanalysis or by the possible invention of a large quantum computer.

In this context, our research work focuses on both families of cryptographic primitives, symmetric and asymmetric primitives. More precisely, our domain in cryptology includes the analysis and the design of

• symmetric primitives (a.k.a. secret-key algorithms),

• public-key primitives based on hard problems coming from coding theory which are likely to be resistant against a quantum computer,

• quantum cryptographic algorithms whose security does not rely on computational assumptions but on the laws of quantum physics.