Cryptography Research Lab  

 Head: Dr. BAO Feng

Cryptography is the science of information confidentiality and integrity and is the basic building block of modern information security systems. We are internationally well known for our research on cryptanalysis. We have broken 49 cryptographic algorithms and systems since 1996.

The Cryptography Research Lab will focus on the design and analysis of cryptographic algorithms and their practical applications. In particular, the lab will focus on:

1)     Cryptanalysis of Algorithms and Systems and Design of Stream Ciphers. We will perform analysis of new cryptosystems as they emerge from the literature and standard bodies. We will challenge ourselves with the tough problem of analyzing one-way hash functions SHA-256 and SHA-512 (called the hash functions for the next century by NIST). Hash functions are the corner stones of security systems; therefore, their security is extremely important. So far, no significant analysis of SHA-256 and SHA-512 has been performed in the world. Today’s existing stream ciphers are designed on ad hoc basis and many of them have been broken. We will explore the theory of stream ciphers design and aim to come out with a steam cipher based on good theoretical foundation. 

2)     Resilient cryptography. Resilient cryptography provides means for maintaining the overall security of a system, even when individual components are repeatedly broken into and controlled by an attacker. Resilient cryptographic functions have to be shared in a distributed dynamic fashion; therefore, they can be used to design multi-party secure computation systems in which multi-parties want to cooperate to compute a function of their inputs without revealing more information than they have to.

The lab aims at delivering high quality publications, patents and training of postgraduate students. In addition, the lab will contribute actively towards national security by working on a 3-year research project on sponsored by DSTA.