Professors of XJTLU Public Lecture｜Post-quantum cryptography – a New Era

Date and Time：

• Time: 17:30 – 19:00
• Date: Thursday, 5th June
• Venue: IA G08, SIP South Campus
• Language: English
• Speaker: Dean of the Academy of Film and Creative Technology, Professor Qian Liu

Abstract:

Public key cryptosystems (PKC) are the security foundation of modern communication systems, in particular, the Internet. However Shor's algorithm shows that the existing PKC like Diffie-Hellmann key exchange, RSA and ECC can be completely broken by a powerful quantum computer. To prepare for the coming age of quantum computing, we need to build new public key cryptosystems that could resist quantum computer attacks. In this lecture, we will present an introduction to post-quantum cryptography and its recent developments, in particular, the NIST standardization process and its impact. Then we will present a practical and provably secure key exchange protocol based on the learning with errors problems, which is conceptually simple and has strong provable security properties. This new construction was established in 2011-2012. We will explain that all the existing LWE-based key exchanges are variants of this fundamental design. We will finally present the challenges facing the post-quantum migration.

Bio:

Professor Jintai Ding is the Dean of the School of Mathematics and Physics at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and a Charles Phelps Taft Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Cincinnati.

He is one of the designers of the only quantum-resistant key establishment standard by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), ML-KEM (FIPS 203), which was formerly called Kyber. He is the inventor and patent owner of the first quantum key exchange which was one of the two patents licensed to NIST for ML-KEM.

Before joining XJTLU, he was a full professor at Tsinghua University. He received his PhD from Yale University in 1995. His research was in quantum affine algebras, where he was credited for the invention of the Ding-Iohara-Miki algebra. His current interest is in post-quantum cryptography. He and his colleagues developed Rainbow signature, a third-round candidate and finalist in the NIST post-quantum standardisation process. He and his colleagues broke a NIST second-round post-quantum signature candidate LUOV and a third-round candidate GeMSS (HFEv-), for which they won the best paper honourable mention award for Crypto 2021. He also served as co-chair for the second, 10th and 11th International Conference on Post-Quantum Cryptography.