Show Sidebar Log in

Bristol student co-author on paper at Warsaw cryptography conference

photo of Sophie StevensBristol University reports that one of its students is co-author on a paper to be presented at The Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC-2015), one of the world’s top cryptography conferences being held in Warsaw this week between 23rd and 25th March.

Sophie Stevens, a mathematics undergraduate, is co-author on the paper “Key-Homomorphic Constrained Pseudorandom Functions” with colleagues from Georgia Tech University in the United States and the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) in Austria. Sophie contributed to the paper during a summer internship at IST under the supervision of Krzysztof Pietrzak. The paper has other connections to Bristol since another co-author, Georg Fuchsbauer, is a former member of staff from the University’s Department of Computer Science.

The paper presents constructions of a family of functions, indexed by a key, which look like they produce random outputs, but for which one can “add” the keys to two functions to obtain another function in the family. The constructions are mainly based on an old area of mathematics arising from the geometry of numbers. Recent years have seen an increasing number of applications of such functions to construct cryptographic schemes with special properties.

Professor Nigel Smart, Head of Bristol University’s Cryptography group,remarked: “It is no mean feat to have a paper accepted at the TCC conference. Many cryptographers, including myself, have never had a paper at this conference. For Sophie to accomplish this at such a young age shows she has a glittering career in front of her.”

One Response to Bristol student co-author on paper at Warsaw cryptography conference

  1. rich March 24, 2015 at 8:28 pm #

    Excellent, well done Sophie!