SECRET Research team

Security, Cryptology and Transmissions

Team presentation

The research work within the SECRET project-team is mostly devoted to the design and analysis of cryptographic algorithms, especially through the study of the involved discrete structures.

It is especially motivated by the fact that the current situation of cryptography is rather fragile: for instance, the security of the available primitives has been so much threatened by the recent progress in cryptanalysis that no stream ciphers and only a few hash functions are nowadays considered to be secure.

Research themes

  • Symmetric cryptology: We focus on stream ciphers, block ciphers and hash functions. Our work considers all aspects of the field, from the practical ones (new attacks, concrete specifications of new systems) to the most theoretical ones (study of the algebraic structure of underlying mathematical objects, definition of optimal objects). As an example, the SECRET project-team is co-designer of 3 new stream ciphers which have been selected for the final phase of the eSTREAM call for proposals.
  • Code-based cryptography: Cryptographic primitives which exploit some problems coming form coding theory provide a good alternative to the commonly used systems based on number theory. They are usually named post-quantum cryptosystems since they would not be solved by the coming up of the quantum computer. We investigate the security of these systems, their practical implementation and the design of fast primitives based on codes. For instance, we have designed a new signature scheme, a hash function and a stream ciphers based on this principle.
  • Cryptanalysis and decoding algorithms: Many cryptanalyses of cryptosystems rely on approximations of these systems by simple, easier functions. Typically, one tries to approximate the system by low degree polynomials, be they in one variable over a huge finite field, or in several variables over the Boolean field. Once such an approximation has been found, the problem of finding the key or of inverting the system is written into a system of simple equations, where each equation holds with some probability. Our work in this context aims at elaborating new cryptanalyses, using progresses in decoding algorithms. We especially focus on iterative decoding and on the Guruswami-Sudan list decoding algorithm.
  • Reverse engineering of communication systems: When a communication is eavesdropped, some raw data, not necessarily encrypted, is observed out of a noisy channel. Then, to access the information, the whole communication system has first to be disassembled and every constituent reconstructed. We study this reverse engineering problem. Most notably, we investigate the problem of recovering the specifications of the involved scranmblers and error-correcting codes.
  • Error correction: Our work in error correction mostly focuses on the design of new codes for fault tolerant quantum computing and quantum communications, and on iterative decoding.
  • Social aspects of cryptology: The SECRET project-team is involved for several years in some research work which aims at establishing close relationships between legal aspects and technological aspects of security.

International and industrial relations

  • Member of the European network of excellence ECRYPT
  • ANR: projects Asphalès, RAPIDE and ED-HASH
  • France Telecom
  • Délégation Générale pour l'Armement, CELAR
  • XLIM, University of Limoges and CNRS
  • ENSTA, Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées
  • Centre d'Etudes sur la Coopération Juridique Internationale, CNRS
  • Selmer Center, University of Bergen
  • ITTP, Russian Academy of Sciences

Keywords: Cryptography Security Encryption Algorithms

Research teams of the same theme :

Inria Headquarters and research centres

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