The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Public-key cryptography is the foundation for establishing secure communication between multiple parties. Traditional public-key algorithms such as RSA are based on the hardness of factoring large numbers or the discrete logarithm problem, but can be attacked in polynomial time once a capable quantum computer exists. Code-based public-key cryptosystems are considered to be post-quantum secure, but compared to RSA or elliptic curve cryptography their crucial drawback is the significantly larger key size. In order to reduce key sizes, (interleaved) rank-metric codes can be used in code-based cryptography. In this talk, we first give an overview of interleaving and decoding algorithms in the Hamming and rank metric and then present different approaches to define code-based cryptographic schemes. Antonia Wachter-Zeh is an Associate Professor at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Munich, Germany in the School of Computation, Information and Technology. She received the M.Sc. degree in communications technology in 2009 from Ulm University, Germany. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in 2013 from Ulm University and from Universite de Rennes 1, Rennes, France. From 2013 to 2016, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, and from 2016 to 2020 a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at TUM. She is a recipient of the DFG Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Preis and of an ERC Starting Grant. She is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Her research interests are coding theory, cryptography and information theory and their application to storage, communications, privacy, security and machine learning.