Cryptography seminars

Oren Renard studies security of quantum position verification based on f-routing. The work derives resource lower bounds for uniformly generated attackers by connecting successful attacks to the computational complexity of the routed function. Separate results cover arbitrary quantum channels, Pauli-sparse unitaries and Clifford+T circuits. Time and space hierarchies yield explicit functions secure against polynomial or quasipolynomial numbers of attacker qubits under these computational restrictions, extending earlier bounds while increasing the complexity of honest evaluation.

Srini Devadas examines how hardware and cryptography can strengthen each other. Hardware can protect keys, monitor attacks in real time and reduce the trusted computing base, while hardware vulnerabilities can undermine software security. The talk presents research on accelerating cryptographic computation and using those capabilities to design more efficient protocols. It also asks how cryptography and new security definitions can guide the construction of secure hardware. Devadas is MIT's Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Hybrid: MIT Stata Center, Room 32-G449 (Kiva), 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139; online via Zoom. Thursday 24 September 2026, talk at 19:00 EDT (UTC−4); in-person refreshments begin at 18:30. This public event is organized by the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM. Register through the organizer-linked Zoom form for either mode and indicate online or in-person attendance. For physical access, use the Stata Center entrance nearest Main Street, then the fourth-floor elevators.

Learning to generate new samples from an unknown Ising distribution exhibits a computational threshold determined by the interaction matrix's spectral width. Below the threshold, empirically initialized Glauber dynamics gives an efficient learner; just above it, a constructed family is cryptographically hard even with parameter access. The talk distinguishes sample generation from parameter estimation and studies a resulting memorization–hallucination trade-off.

Sanjam Garg explores encryption whose decryption condition is solving a puzzle or proving a mathematical statement, rather than simply possessing a conventional cryptographic key. The lecture traces the development of this idea and describes recent advances that are making such schemes more practical for real applications.

Ryann Cartor introduces multivariate public-key cryptography, whose fast and compact post-quantum schemes use polynomial systems over finite fields. The tutorial surveys past and current multivariate cryptosystems before examining MinRank as a central cryptanalytic problem. MinRank attacks have broken prominent schemes in both multivariate and code-based cryptography. The material assumes basic algebra and connects these foundations to current research directions.