RHUL Cyber CDT Blog

This year’s Asiacrypt took place from 4th to 8th December in Guangzhou, China. Many of the presented works contained fascinating ideas, and I also really enjoyed many of the talks that were outside of my research area, homomorphic encryption. For example, the work of [CMT23] proposed an attack on Goppa codes based on fascinating ideas from computational algebraic geometry. Another cool work containing cryptanalysis is [WW23], who presented a potential, very insightful break of the k-R-ISIS assumption in addition to their construction of functional commitments. The session on HE contained four talks, including our talk on using Galois automor-phisms for faster bootstrapping [OPP23]. Afterwards, Zeyu Liu presented their work on bootstrapping [LW23]. It was really nice to finally meet him and his coauthor Yunhao Wang, as we had already exchanged emails before. The other talks on HE proposed a way to compress rotation/Galois keys using a hierarchical structure [Lee+22] and improvements to ...

Far out in the heavily charted waters of the icy Arctic Sea lies a much regarded archipelago called Svalbard, and there, on the largest island Spitzbergen, is a town called Longyearbyen. Much regarded, that is, by international eyes seeking a foothold in the Arctic as ice and snow melt away with climate change, 'opening up' the once mystical Northwest Passage to allow for trading and further extraction of fossil fuels, the use of which continues to be a major contributor to climate change. Consequently, Norway is seeking to maintain its presence on the archipelago as even more eyes turn northwards. There is much fanfare regarding Longyearbyen's "remoteness," and yet it is host to numerous festivals, including the northernmost Blues music festival, Dark Season Blues, and is regarded as home to a whole host of people from various different corners of the globe; in fact, there are over fifty different nationalities registered in Longyearbyen. It was the Blues festiva...