IASG Meeting 1/30/18 - Cryptography

Alex Scheel gives a talk about cryptography and his experiences related to this topic this week: Solving systems of boolean equations is one of the NP-Complete problems in Computer Science. Traditionally thought intractable, the past 20 years of SAT solving competitions has resulted in the development of many fast solvers which have seen adoption by industry. Starting in the early 2000s, the field of logical cryptanalysis was developed by F. Massacci and detailed the application of SAT solvers to cryptanalysis. However, much of the early work until 2010 used cryptography to generate benchmarks for SAT solvers instead of using them for cryptanalysis. In this talk, we present new techniques for horizontally-scalable logical cryptanalysis of hash functions. These techniques allow us to study the structure inherent to the function and easily probe them for weaknesses, giving implications for real-world applications.