Chris Peikert

Researcher Cameo Presentation
Professor Chris Peikert

Charles Ziegenbein Jr.
1
Biography
● Ph.D from MIT, 2006
○ Advisor: Silvio Micali
● Professorship in 2021!
● Research interests include lattice-based cryptography, coding
theory, algorithms and post-quantum cryptography
○ Cryptographic schemes whose security can be based on the
apparent intractability of lattice problems
https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~cpeikert/
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Discussion Questions
1. How did you first become interested in lattice-based cryptography?
2. What do you find to be the biggest challenge in classical /
lattice-based cryptography research?
3. What application of cryptography are you most excited about?
4. (Research-specific question) From a high-level, how do
Crystals-Kyber and Falcon work?
5. How hard is it to get cryptographic schemes approved by NIST?
What is that process like?
6. What challenges are associated with a post-quantum world?
3
Lattice-Based Cryptography In 1 Minute
● Constructions of cryptographic primitives that include the use of
lattices
○ Infinite set of points in the real coordinate space where
addition and subtraction of points produces more points
● Lattice-based constructions appear to be resistant to quantum
attacks
○ Computational Lattice Problems, cannot be efficiently solved
○ Assumes worst-case hardness, but many results are unknown
● Supports encryption, decryption, homomorphic encryption, key
exchange, digital signatures
4
Discussion Question 1
How did you first become interested in lattice-based cryptography?
● Graduate school, wanted to do cryptography but also wanted to do something
involving continuous math
○ No real intersection at the time
● 2002-2003: Attended a conference talk given by Shafi Goldwasser that talked
about how great lattices are in crypto
● 2004-2005: postdoc at MIT introduced him to some papers, worked on problem
together
○ Struck all the cords, checked all boxes
● Prove a result that had been left open, never looked back from there.
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What do you find to be the biggest challenge in lattice cryptography research?
● Different variety of challenges that are incomparable, depends on what you’re
trying to accomplish
○ Making everything real, getting it into practice (practitioners)
○ A lot of concepts in cryptography that have been built up over 40 years that
was built on standard, classical, mathematical foundations
○ For exotic privacy enhancing cryptosystems, FHE, making those efficient
enough and expressive enough for large-scale computations
6
What application of lattice-based cryptography are you most excited about?
● Long term, applications of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)
○ Not necessarily for FHE per-se, lots of techniques in core FHE schemes can be
used in surprising ways
■ Don’t even have to do with encryption
○ Side effect of FHE research is applying some branches to other things that
aren’t necessarily about encryption
○ Succinct cryptography
7
(Research-specific question) From a high-level, how do Crystals-Kyber
and Falcon work?
● Two announced standards
1. Kyber
● Encryption
2. Falcon
● Digital Signatures
8
Discussion Question 4: Kyber
● Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM)
● Public/Private key generated
○ Public key is a lattice (long vectors)
○ Given public key, hard for attacker to find short vectors
○ Private key is a short vector within that lattice
● To encrypt, someone uses public key and effectively chooses

random point in the lattice, adds noise to that point (perturbation),
shifts it by the message to embed
● To decrypt, receiver uses knowledge of short lattice vector to
detect that one point is perturbed, and that it is shifted, strip the
point and then decrypt
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Discussion Point 4: Falcon
● Digital Signature scheme
● KeyGen produces public lattice, private key is collection of many short vectors
within that lattice
● Signing:
○ Apply public hash function to the message, maps the message to a random
point in space (ambient space of the lattice)
○ To sign, take the short lattice vectors to decode this random point to a
nearby lattice point (lattice is a grid), this is a signature
● Verifying:
○ Same hashing procedure, get the same point in space, nearby lattice point
(from pub key) and check to see if they are in similar area
● Security comes from hashing to random point, find the nearby lattice point,
which is the hard problem given you don't have the short vectors,
○ Hard to do with the public key alone
10
When developing these primitives, what is the process for being approved by NIST?
● Result of long sequence of works
● Falcon started in 2008, how to do signatures in the first place
○ Falcon is in this area with efficiency enhancements
● Similarly for Kyber, core ideas go all the way back from 1996/2002/2005
● No one expects it to be a national standard, but it gets a lot of uptake, people start
asking questions about adding it in practice
● 2015 → NIST expresses standardizing post-quantum, governmental agencies

express alarm about post-quantum attacks
● Confluence of “we can do this” with expressed need from community
● Standardization effort, different teams with different ideas, banking off of each
other, finding different improvements, optimizations
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What challenges are associated with a post-quantum world?
● Have enough time, get everything tested, deployed and working
○ Upwards of 20 years
● Remove the old, which is the hardest part
○ Don’t have to remove everything, apply pre and post quantum
in parallel
○ Need to break both in order to break the entire system
● Being able to fit post-quantum schemes into low-resource /
low-power environments
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Researcher Cameo Presentation

Professor Chris Peikert

● To encrypt, someone uses public key and effectively chooses

● 2015 → NIST expresses standardizing post-quantum, governmental agencies

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