Post-Quantum Cryptography: Understanding Supersingular Isogenies 🔐

A large-scale quantum computer would break the public key cryptography that is currently used to secure the internet. While scientists around the world are in a race to build quantum computers, cryptographers are frantically working to reinvent encryption in order to secure our digital world before that day comes.

In this webinar led by Microsoft researcher Dr. Craig Costello, you will examine why post-quantum cryptography is so critical as we move closer to realizing quantum computing, and you will learn the basics of supersingular isogeny Diffie-Hellman (SIDH), which is one of the popular candidates for post-quantum key exchange. The best known classical and quantum algorithms for attacking the SIDH protocol have exponential runtimes, which is why SIDH has the lowest bandwidth requirements of all the post-quantum encryption candidates currently under scrutiny.

Together, you’ll explore:

■ The motivation for post-quantum cryptography
■ Foundational theory of elliptic curves and isogenies
■ A step-by-step example of the SIDH protocol
■ Where to find open source software for post-quantum cryptography

𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁:

■ Supersingular isogeny key exchange for beginners (tutorial) - https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1321.pdf
■ Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation (SIKE) (project page) - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/sike/
■ Download the code (GitHub) - https://github.com/Microsoft/PQCrypto-SIKE
■ Read De Feo’s more advanced lecture notes on the mathematics of isogeny-based cryptography -https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.04062.pdf
■ News from the front in the post-quantum crypto wars (podcast) - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/news-from-the-front-in-the-post-quantum-crypto-wars-with-dr-craig-costello/
■ Craig Costello: In the war for information, will quantum computers defeat cryptographers? (TED Talk) - https://www.ted.com/talks/craig_costello_in_the_war_for_information_will_quantum_computers_defeat_cryptographers
■ Read the original SIDH paper - https://eprint.iacr.org/2011/506.pdf
■ Check out NIST’s post-quantum standardization initiative - https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/post-quantum-cryptography
■ Craig Costello (Researcher Profile) - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/craigco/

*This on-demand webinar features a previously recorded Q&A session and open captioning.

This webinar originally aired on May 28, 2020

Explore more Microsoft Research webinars: https://aka.ms/msrwebinars