Crypto 2010 rump session

One of the leading indicators of upcoming advances in cryptography is the rump session at the CRYPTO conference. Speakers are given 3 minutes to introduce works in progress or crack jokes. For example, I remember Paul Kocher’s groundbreaking presentation on extremely low exponent RSA (e=1). Here is more history of this casual, but important, event each year.

This year’s session had some interesting talks, mostly about SHA-3 hash candidates. Dinur and Shamir announced an algebraic attack on Hamsi-256, which has had other attacks announced previously. They also attacked the Grain-128 stream cipher. Leurent spoke about distinguishing attacks and whether a hash function can remain secure even when the underlying compression function has efficient distinguishers.

Cohn and Heninger presented a survey of applications of Coppersmith’s theorem, which has many uses beyond cryptanalysis of public key systems. There was a lot of interest in making public key systems resilient in the face of leakage (e.g., via side channels). This is good since traditional (EC)DSA falls apart if the nonce is even partially predictable. A presentation on noisy Diffie-Hellman looked interesting, although the applications are unclear to me.

On the implementation front, Mroczkowski described a fast implementation of Trivium in Python. It used the CorePy library to generate SSE3 instructions. This was to optimize the cube attack previously announced by Dinur and Shamir in 2008.

And finally, the humorous CFP for the Journal of Craptology was a great way to end. What were your favorite rump session talks?