Everybody is welcome to attend the public defense by Gabriele Spini of his thesis 'Unconditionally Secure Cryptographic Protocols from Coding-Theoretic Primitives'.
Promotor: Prof. Ronald Cramer (CWI Amsterdam & Universiteit Leiden)
Promotor: Prof. Gilles Zémor (Université de Bordeaux)
Copromotor: Dr. Serge Fehr (CWI Amsterdam)
About Gabriele Spini's research
"The dissertation presents new cryptographic protocols, which can be divided into two families, depending on their scope. Protocols in the first family achieve unilateral security: this means that they protect legitimate users against interference from an external attacker. Concretely, we focus on scenarios where two users wish to communicate securely over a given communication system (for instance, a number of two-way channels, or a network that transforms data to maximize efficiency), and where an external attacker eavesdrops and tampers with some of the wires of the system. We contribute to the topic by presenting protocols with improved efficiency and a simpler definition compared to previous work, and we also design interactive protocols that achieve security against a stronger attacker.
Protocols of the second type achieve multilateral security, meaning that they protect the involved users against each other. This is the case for multi-party computation or MPC, where several users wish to compute a function on the private inputs they hold without revealing the inputs and without appealing to a trusted third party; we contribute to this topic by adding a cheater-detection functionality to a well-established and efficient MPC protocol.
A key component that underlies these scenarios is secret sharing; aside from using it as a starting point to construct the above protocols, we investigate this topic on its own, casting in particular a new light on its connections with coding theory. This allows us to better harness the features of recent code constructions to obtain improved secret-sharing schemes."
Gabriele Spini after his PhD defence. Gabriele is the fifth person from the left. (Own picture.)
