University Residential Centre of Bertinoro

A vast majority of existing systems in practice based their security on unproven complexity assumptions such as the hardness of factoring. While unconditional security would obviously be preferable, Shannon's classical results from information theory seem to imply that this is either impossible or impractical. However, a large number of recent research results have made it clear that the impossiblity results do not always apply, and that unconditional security is a real possibility in many scenarios.

The purpose of this course is to give PhD students and others with a general interest in cryptography a deeper understanding of the possibilities and limitations of unconditional security in cryptography. We intend to give basic introductions as well as more advanced lectures for all subjects covered.

Main subjects covered:

• Secret sharing and Unconditionally secure Multiparty Computation
• Randomization techniques for Multiparty Computation
• Private Information Retrieval and Oblivious Transfer
• Key exchange from correlated randomness
• Crypto based on noisy channels
• Introduction to Quantum information and Quantum Key Distribution,
• Quantum privacy amplification and security of Quantum Key Distribution
• Memory bounded (Quantum) Cryptography

The course is organized by the ECRYPT Network of Excellence, supported by the European Commision and will be held in Bertinoro, Italy, October 16-21, 2005. A limited number of stipends for participation are available for students from non-ECRYPT institutions. For more information about this, contact the organizers.

Speakers:

Access to Material: