PIMS Network Wide Colloquium: Vinod Vaikuntanathan
Topic
Lattices and Cryptography: A Match Made in Heaven
Speakers
Details
Integer lattices play a central role in mathematics and computer science, with applications ranging from number theory and coding theory to combinatorial optimization. Over the past three decades, they have also become a cornerstone of modern cryptography.
In this talk, I will describe the evolution of lattices in cryptography: from the early use of lattices to break classical cryptosystems; to their application in designing new encryption and digital signature schemes with (conjectured) post-quantum security; and to their role in achieving long-standing cryptographic goals such as fully homomorphic encryption that allow us to compute directly on encrypted data.
The talk will not assume any prior background in cryptography.
Additional Information
About the Speaker: Vinod Vaikuntanathan is the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering in MIT’s EECS department, a principal investigator at CSAIL, and chief cryptographer at Duality Technologies. He received his BTech from IIT Madras and his SM and PhD from MIT, and joined the MIT faculty in 2013 after research roles at IBM, Microsoft, and the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the foundations of cryptography, with seminal contributions to fully homomorphic encryption and lattice-based cryptography, and recent interests spanning quantum computing, statistics, and machine learning. His work has been widely recognized, including the Gödel Prize, Simons Investigator Award, MacVicar Faculty Fellowship, and multiple best paper and test-of-time awards from leading conferences.