Research Area:
Cryptography
Description
Cryptography is about solving impossible problems. For
example, consider the problem of accurate, verifiable and
private electronic voting. At first glance, it seems that
it is impossible to have a protocol for voting that would be
guaranteed to tally the votes correctly, do so in public so
everyone can see it was tallied correctly, and yet, still,
somehow hide all information about how each individual cast
his or her vote. Yet, it turns out that it is possible, and
what's more, there are practical and provaly secure
algorithms for it, and much, much more!
The cryptography group at Brown successfully works on
similarly impossible problems. For example, we work on
practical and provably secure solutions to the problem of
authentication with identification, where one can prove that
one is an authorized user without revealing one's identity.
We are developing extremely efficient algorithms for
authenticating high volumes of data in non-trusted
distributed environments. While firmly rooted in theory,
our research is intended to be useful in practice, and we
collaborate extensively with both theoreticians and
systems-builders.
Faculty
Topics or Projects
