Susan Hohenberger-Waters, a research professor in the Department of Computer Science—along with co-authors Venkata Koppula, a postdoctoral researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and Brent Waters, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a distinguished scientist at NTT Research—took home the Best Paper Award at the 2020 Annual International Cryptology Conference, the field of cryptography’s annual international flagship conference. The conference, commonly called CRYPTO, was held virtually in August this year.
The team’s paper, “Chosen Ciphertext Security from Injective Trapdoor Functions,” focuses on the security of encryption. Encryption allows one to encode data so it is accessible only by the holder of a secret “key” that can decode the data.
“This is important if, for example, an organization’s data were to be stored in encrypted form on a third-party cloud site,” Hohenberger-Waters says.
Her team’s award-winning work concerns securing encryption against attackers that might try to maliciously tamper with data accessed by the secret key holder.
“The work is fundamental in that it shows systems resistant to such attacks can be built from a basic cryptographic primitive known as a trapdoor function. This problem had been open for many years,” says Hohenberger-Waters.
Now in its 40th year, CRYPTO is organized annually by the International Association for Cryptologic Research, a non-profit scientific organization whose purpose is to further research in cryptology and related fields.