Cryptology: Encryption, digital signatures and zero knowledge identification protocols

Title

Cryptology: Encryption, digital signatures and zero knowledge identification protocols

Speaker

Prof. Guillermo Morales-Luna. (Cinvestav-IPN, Mexico City, and GTIIT)

Time and Location

May. 22, 2023, Monday, 19:00-20:00, E509 (Education Building, 5th floor)

Pizza will be provided after the seminar

Abstract

NP-hard problems, or expected to be such problems, are the basis of cryptographic protocols. One-way functions are maps that are efficiently  computable, say in lower degree polynomial time. In a rather general way, given a computationally hard problem, a key generator produces strings representing solutions of instances of the problem. The instances are properly public keys and the produced solutions are the corresponding private, or secret, keys. The relation private_key–>public key should be thus a one-way function. Public key encryption are based on the Factorization Problem and the Discrete Logarithmic Problem. Digital signature schemes are based on robust hashing maps. In zero-knowledge protocols, a prover must prove that he possesses the corresponding private key of his public key without revealing any hint of the private key. A verifier poses queries that can  be correctly answered only by an agent knowing the private key, namely just by the prover. All these protocols use one-way maps obtained by NP-hard problems.

Biography

Guillermo Morales-Luna received the BSc degree in mathematics from the Mexican National Polytechnic Institute in 1977, the MSc degree in mathematics from Mexican CINVESTAV-IPN, in 1978, and the PhD degree from the Mathematics Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1984. Since 1985 he is a researcher at CINVESTAV-IPN. His research interest include cryptography,  complexity theory, and mathematical logic. He is a Mexican national and  he also holds Polish citizenship. At present time he is a Visiting Professor in the Mathematics and Computer Science program in GTIIT.