Date: 2010/5/27 (Tue) 15F30`17F00

      Place: Collaboration Room #7 (Information Science Building, 5th floor)

      Name: Matt Henricksen
          Principal Investigator, Symmetric Cryptology, at Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore
      Title: Unsolved problems in Stream Cipher research


      Abstract: The successful conclusion of ECRYPT eSTREAM in April 2008 resulted in eight stream ciphers that looked secure and efficient in software &/ hardware. That might lead to the belief that there is little new research to do in the stream cipher field. In this talk, I look at three areas where more research is required: stream cipher authentication, which generates authentication tags at low cost simultaneous to encryption; secure and fast modes of conversion from block ciphers to stream ciphers, as typified by the flawed cipher LEX; and resilience to side-channel attacks, such as defeating the Leander-Zenner-Hawkes cache-timing attack on any cipher that uses an LFSR. In all aspects, I show the problems faced by describing attacks on real ciphers.

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