June 1, 2004 marked the beginning of a new research group on fundamental and practice oriented Cryptology and Information Security (PNA5). The group is led by Ronald Cramer, who recently joined CWI. It also includes the Computational Number Theory group of Herman te Riele, which used to be part of the Computing and Control theme MAS2.
One focal point of the theme is secure computation. This area deals with two or more parties who wish to achieve a joint task securely even though they are mutually distrustful and wish to keep sensitive, private information secret from each other. This is sometimes called multi-lateral security, as opposed to unilateral security in the case of secure communications. Practical applications include profile matching, joint database comparison, electronic voting or auctions, and threshold cryptography.
Other focal points include the well-known Number Field Sieve Project for factoring large integers and other issues in computational number theory with relevance for cryptology, public key cryptography, information theoretically secure cryptography, quantum cryptography, formal security analysis and applied information security.
More information can be found on Ronald Cramer's homepage or PNA5
