LSV Seminar
The LSV seminar takes place on Tuesday at 11:00 AM. The usual location is the conference room at Pavillon des Jardins (venue). If you wish to be informed by e-mail about upcoming seminars, please contact Stéphane Le Roux and Matthias Fuegger.
The seminar is open to public and does not require any form of registration.
Past Seminars
Everlasting Security through Quantum Cryptography
- Date
- Tuesday, January 17 2012 at 11:00AM
- Place
- Salle de Conférence (Pavillon des Jardins)
- Speaker
- Dominique Unruh (University of Tartu, Estonie)
Cryptography is a powerful tool for processing confidential data. Cryptographic protocols are, however, only as secure as the underlying encryption schemes. And we do not know whether these might not be broken at some point in the future. This leaves us in a difficult situation: If we process highly sensitive data using cryptographic protocols, an attacker might simply record all messages. Should the underlying encryption scheme be broken in the future, the attacker will then be able to decrypt all confidential data in retrospect. For highly confidential data (such as, e.g., medical records) such a situation is not acceptable.
A way out is "everlasting security". A protocol with everlasting security guarantees that all data involved in the protocol stays secure, even if at some point in the future all the underlying encryption schemes are broken. Unfortunately, with traditional cryptographic techniques, everlasting security can only be achieved in very limited situations.
In this talk, we explain how everlasting security can be achieved for a wide variety of tasks by using quantum cryptography, i.e., by making use of quantum mechanical effects in the cryptographic protocol.