Tuesday, September 1, 2020

Researchers leading quest to protect against quantum attacks

By Ryon Jones. This article originally appeared on Waterloo Stories.

The University of Waterloo emerged as the Canadian institution with the largest involvement in the latest round of submissions selected by the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization process.

After three years of review, four submissions involving Waterloo researchers in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization are among the seven finalists and eight alternates, still in the running for potential standardization in the future, selected by NIST in the third round of the competition-like process. There were originally a total of 69 submissions received from around the world.

Cryptographic standards are particularly important, as they enable secure communication and commerce at a global scale. These standards take a long time to develop, and the cryptographic standards available today were developed before cryptographers really took the threat of quantum computers seriously.

NIST is looking to find the best ways to establish a secret key between two parties on different communications channels to ensure the privacy of the communications between them, with the aim of selecting the best of these methods to become the new standard.

John Schanck, a post-doctoral fellow, is involved in two submissions shortlisted among the seven finalists.

Schanck is the team lead for NTRU, which is the oldest system based on hard math problems around lattices in the competition. NTRU’s age, a long history of failed attempts to attack it, and the fact that its patents have now expired are among the reasons it emerged as a finalist.

“I was employed by Security Innovation from 2011 to 2016, while they owned NTRU Cryptosystems,” Schanck explains. “While I was there, I made several small improvements to the design, and these changes were incorporated into the NIST submission.”

Schanck is also a member of the team behind Crystals-Kyber, a much more recent design that offers a higher level of security than NTRU for a fixed performance budget.

“Another finalist, Saber, is a tweak on the Crystals-Kyber design,” Schanck shares. “We expect there will be a significant discussion between the two teams in the third round, and hopefully some consensus will emerge on which of the two systems is the better design.”

Douglas Stebila, an associate professor, is a co-submitter of the alternate candidate, FrodoKEM. Some of the partners on FrodoKEM include Microsoft Research and Google.

FrodoKEM belongs to the family of lattice-based cryptography, which also includes the NTRU and Crystals-Kyber submissions.

“The difference with FrodoKEM is that the mathematical problems it relies on have less structure,” Stebila says. “On the one hand, having less structure means that there are potentially fewer avenues of attack, but this does come at the cost of being less efficient and having larger communication overhead.”

Outside of the NIST process, earlier this year, FrodoKEM was selected by the German government’s Federal Office for Information Security as one of two post-quantum algorithms suitable for immediate use for long-term protection of information against quantum adversaries.

Professor David Jao and Geovandro Pereira, a post-doctoral fellow in Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing, are the lead author and co-submitter respectively for alternate candidate SIKE. Jao and Pereira have partnered with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft Research, IBM Research Zurich, Infosec and LinkedIn Corporation on the project.

SIKE is a family of post-quantum key encapsulation mechanisms based on a key exchange protocol called Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman (SIDH), invented by Professor Jao. It contains two algorithms that make it difficult for hackers to intercept the key with either a classical or quantum computer.

“A notable advantage of SIKE is that it has smaller encryption keys than any other proposed candidate,” explains Jao. “This feature makes SIKE suitable for devices and applications where size is at a premium.”

The review process for the third round will last about a year, with NIST aiming to release the first standard for quantum-resistant cryptography in 2022.

MATLAB campus site licence expanded

A message from Information Systems & Technology (IST).

The free temporary campus license for MATLAB expired on August 31, 2020. The Faculty of Engineering and the Faculty of Mathematics have agreed to fund an expanded campus license until September 2021.

New features of the expanded campus license include:

• Unlimited access all new and future add-on “toolboxes” at no additional cost
• Software available to all UWaterloo faculty, staff, and students for non-commercial research and academic use
• Accelerator & Startup Program provides UWaterloo start-up businesses with one year of free access to MATLAB
• Use of MATLAB is extended to high performance computing clusters
• Courseware for instructors, including MATLAB Grader service for evaluating students’ code
• Extensive training materials through the UWaterloo portal on Mathworks’ web site.

All MATLAB users can download and install the software on their own computers or use MATLAB through a browser in the MATLAB Online cloud. For details of how to access MATLAB under this expanded campus agreement, please visit the how-to site. .

Anyone with questions or concerns should contact rt-ist-CSSoftware@rt.uwaterloo.ca.

Reminder: masks are mandatory on campus

As campus gets ready for the fall term, remember that a face covering is required in  common use areas of  University buildings. This includes corridors, lobbies, washrooms, elevators, classrooms, teaching laboratories and meeting rooms, or in any area where physical distancing is a challenge.

A face covering can be a medical or non-medical mask or other covering that covers the nose, mouth and chin.  You can bring your own mask to campus or purchase a cloth mask at the W Store. Additional protective equipment may be needed in specific lab or work settings. Find the latest guidelines for researchers and employees.

Researchers, managers and supervisors are reminded that if you are or have employees who are currently working on campus, you should place an order for face masks immediately. You can order cloth face masks from Central Stores. Learn more about ordering face masks.

If you are working from home, please continue to do so until you receive further direction from your manager or supervisor.

Learn more about face coverings on campus: https://uwaterloo.ca/coronavirus/return-campus/masks-or-other-face-coverings-are-required-campus