Asiacrypt 2021

Asiacrypt is one of the three annual flagship conferences in cryptography. Organized by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), the 2021 edition will be held virtually on December 6-10, 2021.

Damien Stehlé and Alice Pellet-Mary

Damien Stehlé is a professor at the Computer Science Laboratory of ENS of Lyon (LIP | CNRS / ENS of Lyon / Inria / Lyon 1).

Alice Pellet-Mary is a former PhD student of Damien Stehlé who currently holds a CNRS researcher position at the University of Bordeaux, within the Bordeaux Institute of Mathematics (IMB).

On the hardness of the NTRU problem

Abstract: The NTRU problem is one of the security foundations of public-key cryptography. We provide partial answers to the long-standing open problem of proving the hardness of the NTRU problem, under standard assumptions. In particular, we show that if a variant of NTRU can be solved efficiently in the average case, then short vectors in Euclidean lattices related to number fields can be found efficiently in the worst case. 

This is a timely result for the standardisation of post-quantum cryptography. In the context of the competition organized by the NIST (the American Institute for Standards and Technologies), whose completion is planned for the end of 2021, NTRUEncrypt is one of the four finalist encryption schemes. It has very strong chances to be kept as the future encryption standard, because it enjoys the distinctive advantage of being 25 year old, and hence to be immune to attempts of intellectual property predation.