The security of cryptographic protocols is based on the conjectured intractability of some mathematical problem, typically a single problem. However, in some cases, novel constructions emerge out of the surprising interplay of seemingly disparate mathematical structures and conjectured hard problems on these. Though unusual, this cooperation between assumptions, when it happens, can lead to progress on important open problems. This sometimes paves the way for subsequent improvements, which may even eliminate the multiplicity and reduce security to a single assumption.
In this talk, I will give examples from recent work that have benefited from this interplay, leveraging diverse mathematical structures and assumptions in a way that yields more than a "sum of parts", and leads to surprising progress in longstanding problems.
Short Bio:
Dr. Shweta Agrawal is a professor at the Computer Science and Engineering department, at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. She earned her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, and did her postdoctoral work at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her area of research is cryptography with a focus on post quantum cryptography. She has won multiple awards and honours such as the Swarnajayanti award, the ACM India award for Outstanding Contributions to Computing by a Woman, a best paper award at Eurocrypt, Google India faculty award, BY award for excellence in research and teaching, invited speaker at prestigious conferences like Asiacrypt and "Women in Mathematics" and program co-chair for the flagship conference Asiacrypt.
