Estonian Cryptography

News

• 28.02-05.03.10: EWSCS 2010 in Palmse. Winter school. Includes lecture courses by Jens Groth and Aggelos Kiayias.
• 11.06-13.06.10: Theory Days in Elva, security/crypto edition.
• 30.09-03.10.10: Estonian-Latvian Joint Theory Days in Rakari, Latvia.
• 04.02-06.02.10: Theory Days in Nelijärve.
• 27.02-04.03.11: EWSCS 2011 in Palmse. Winter school. Includes lecture courses by Dominique Unruh
• 01.03.11: our team was joint by prof. Dominique Unruh (University of Tartu)
• 15.05-19.05.11: Eurocrypt 2011 in Tallinn. General chair: Helger Lipmaa.
• 20.05.11: PhD defence of Margus Niitsoo ("Black-box Oracle Separation Techniques with Applications in Time-stamping")
• 30.06.11: FCC 2011, Seventh Workshop on Formal and Computational Cryptography. Paris, France. PC chair: Unruh
• 29.09-30.09.11: VoteID 2011, the 3rd international conference on e-voting and identity, in Tallinn. PC chair: Lipmaa
• 10.10.11: PhD defence of Bingsheng Zhang (Efficient cryptographic protocols for secure and private remote databases)
• 26.10-28.10.11: NordSec 2011, the 16th Nordic Conference in Secure IT Systems. Tallinn, Estonia. PC chair: Peeter Laud.
• 26.02-02.03.12: Estonian Winter School in Computer Science has a lecture course by Vassil Dimitrov on "Computational number theory and its applications". Palmse, Estonia.
• 24.03-01.04.12: POST 2012, First Conference on Principles of Security and Trust. Tallinn, Estonia.
• 16-20.07.12: Helger Lipmaa is invited lecturer at SecVote 2012 summer school on secure e-voting, Dagstuhl, Germany.
• 07-08.05.12: Two quest presentations by Vitaly Skachek on coding theory in Tartu:
  • Pseudocodeword redundancy and efficient decoding of LDPC codes (video)
  • New Directions in Coding Theory (video)
• 30.05.12: a lecture by Helger Lipmaa in University of Latvia on "Lattice-based cryptography"
• A lecture course "Efficient implementations of cryptographic algorithms" by Vassil Dimitrov (U Tartu, May 2012)
• 07.06.12: Quest lecture by Andris Ambainis on "Cryptography that is secure against quantum computers"
  • Newsbite in Latvia

Introduction

All mathematics is divided into three parts: cryptography (paid for by CIA, KGB and the like), hydrodynamics (supported by manufacturers of atomic submarines) and celestial mechanics (financed by military and by other institutions dealing with missiles, such as NASA.). Cryptography has generated number theory, algebraic geometry over finite fields, algebra, combinatorics and computers. --- V.I. Arnold

Cryptology deals with the mathematical techniques for achieving privacy (and secure computing in general), with cryptography dealing with the construction of new primitives and protocols, and cryptanalysis dealing with the analysis and attacking of existing primitives/protocols.

Due to the enormous importance of secure computing, cryptography is currently on of the most widely researched topics in computer science, with research groups in almost all major universities (and three cryptography professors at MIT) and coorporate research laboratories.

Cryptography in Estonia

Estonian cryptographic research was initiated in mid-90s, with the first significant publication being from 1998 (Crypto 1998 conference). After that, our people have published in many major conferences (Crypto, ACM CCS, Asiacrypt, ICALP, PKC, FSE, etc); individual Estonian cryptographers are internationally well recognized. The research interests of Estonian cryptographers are wide-spread. We do active research in differential cryptanalysis, signature schemes, cryptographic protocols, privacy-preserving data mining, PKI, time stamping, language-based security and Dolev-Yao model. (This is not an exhaustive list.)

Most of Estonian cryptographers are based in < HREF="http://www.ut.ee">University of Tartu and Cybernetica AS (which has offices both in Tallinn and in Tartu), while a few are currently working or studying abroad. At the University of Tartu, there are at least three different courses in cryptography plus some additional seminars. University of Tartu is also participating in the Erasmus Mundus NordSecMob Master Programme. Tallinn Technical University has two different courses in cryptography. Also, University of Tartu and Tallinn Technical University have a new joint MSc programme in cyber defence. Due to the good number of experienced researchers, the cryptography group there is able to supervise a relatively large number of students.

We are also actively involved in consulting and commerical projects.