Graduate Student Colloquium

Christopher Hawthorne, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo

"Cryptographic primitives and applications"

Modern computers and the internet rely heavily on cryptography to keep our communications and machines safe from malicious parties; in fact, much of this cryptography is implemented using elementary algebra. In this talk, I will present three cryptographic primitives (symmetric encryption, public key encryption, and digital signatures), describe how one might construct instances of these primitives, and give an idea of how they are used in modern computing. Time permitting I will cover a fourth cryptographic primitive: secret sharing schemes.

MC 5501