The Real World Crypto Symposium 2022, being the most important symposium that brings together cryptography researchers and developers implementing cryptography in real-world systems, took place in Amsterdam from 13 to 15 April 2022. Being held in person again for the first time after 2020, it attracted 485 in-person participants and several hundred online. The event was sponsored by large companies such as Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Google, Intel, Meta, and NXP. Keynotes were given by speakers from Meta, Google, NIST among others.
Christoph Striecks, Scientist in the AIT Center for Digital Safety & Security, held a contributed talk on “Puncturable Encryption – A Fine-Grained Approach to Forward Security and More” presenting joint work with his AIT colleagues Daniel Slamanig and Sebastian Ramacher, both also Scientists in the AIT Center for Digital Safety & Security.
Puncturable Encryption represents a strong form of encryption which guarantees that data encrypted today will stay secure even if the encryption key becomes available at some point in the future. This form of security is called forward security and is widely deployed in interactive scenarios such as the Internet or secure messaging. However, in more heterogeneous scenarios such as the Internet of Things or in the automotive domain where entities communicate asynchronously or require low latency, forward security is not easy to achieve. Puncturable Encryption can help here to also guarantee strong security while preserving utility.
Enhancements of Puncturable Encryption were researched and developed at AIT in the projects SECREDAS, COMP4DRONES, PROFET, and KRAKEN.
- Link to symposium: https://rwc.iacr.org/2022
- More on the topic: https://profet.at/blog/pe