Huaxiong Wang and Jennifer Seberry and Chaoping Xing and Yvo Desmedt. Secure Multi-Party Computation. ARC Discovery Project, 2006 – 2008, $390,000.
Secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows a set of players to compute an arbitrary function f of their private inputs. The computation guarantees the correctness of the result while preserving the privacy of the players' inputs, even if some of the players are corrupted by an adversary and misbehave in an arbitrary and malicious way. Almost any distributed cryptographic protocol can be realised using a general MPC protocol. MPC protocols are important building blocks for reducing the required trust and to facilitate building secure distributed systems.
Huaxiong Wang and Chris Charnes. Private Information Retrieval. ARC Discovery Project, 2005 – 2007, $296,000.
The widespread use of the
World-Wide Web and Internet applications make publicly accessible databases an
indispensable resource for retrieving up-to-date information. However,
accessing such databases poses significant risks to user privacy. Private
Information Retrieval (PIR) is a cryptographic solution that allows a user to
retrieve data items without disclosing the nature of their query to the
database server. The aims of this project are to develop theories, techniques
and tools that can be used for analysis and assessment of secure PIRs; and design efficient and practical PIRs that can be used to cater for different real-life
applications.
Huaxiong Wang. Security Service for Stream-based and Group-oriented Communication. ARC Discovery Project, 2003-2004, $100,000.
Multicast communication is a relatively recent mode of communication that allows a sender to efficiently broadcast a message to a group of users. Because of this high efficiency, multicast is becoming the basis for a growing number of applications such as broadcasting stock quotes, special sporting events, Internet news, and pay TV. It is therefore critical to provide sound security mechanisms for multicast communication. Yet, existing security protocols for multicast offer only partial solutions. Providing the two basic security services, secrecy and authentication, in the context of multicast stream communication, is the main goal of this project.
Josef Pieprzyk and Huaxiong
Wang. Algebraic Cryptanalysis of
cryptosystems. ARC Discovery Project, 2003-2005, $225,000.
The aims of this project are: (i) to apply the algebraic attacks to Rijndael, the new proposed Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), to Serpent (the second algorithm in the AES competition), and to other algorithms including hash functions; (ii) to develop a theoretical framework for algebraic cryptanalysis of modern private-key cryptographic algorithms; (iii) to search for new more efficient factoring algorithms using algebraic approach; (iv) to develop new design criteria for S-boxes that provide immunity against algebraic attacks.