Unfortunately, the use of lattices in cryptography so far has been limited to relatively simple primitives such as one-way functions and public-key encryption.
In this talk, I will describe new ways to generate and exploit *trapdoors* in lattices. The cryptographic applications of our techniques are numerous: we design various kinds of trapdoor functions, simple and efficient digital signature schemes, general secure multiparty computation, and identity-based encryption, all based on the worst-case hardness of lattice problems.
Bio: Vinod Vaikuntanathan is currently a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he obtained his masters degree in 2005. He attended the Indian Institute of Technology at Madras for his undergraduate studies.
He is interested in theoretical computer science and in particular, cryptography, complexity theory and the theory of distributed systems. Of late, he has been studying the fruitful relationship between cryptography and geometric objects called lattices.
Refreshments will be provided at 10:45