Post by Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica

How sound are the design principles behind next-generation cryptography? Last week, our CWI colleague Yu-Hsuan Huang defended his PhD at Leiden University. The research for his thesis - "Post-Quantum Security of Cryptographic Transformations in the Random Oracle Model" - was supervised by Ronald Cramer and Serge Fehr. His work concerns important design principles used for constructing the cryptographic schemes that will underpin the security of our future digital communication, when attackers may have quantum computers. During the course of his PhD research, Yu-Hsuan, together with his coauthors, established the soundness of several such design principles through rigorous mathematical proofs, and so provided strong evidence that the resulting cryptographic schemes offer the desired security. They also discovered and fixed a subtle flaw in prior security analyses of important, long-standing (15+ year-old) design principles that are used by many post-quantum schemes, including one of the future PQC NIST standards, Dilithium (ML-DSA). Thanks to this work at CWI, these future cryptographic schemes now rest on firmer theoretical foundations, helping safeguard digital communications for years to come. Warm congratulations to Yu-Hsuan on this achievement! 🎉