CAREER: Fundamental Limits of Cryptographic Primitives Through Network Information Theory

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The advent of the modern information age is enabled by pervasive networked communication and computation devices, which accelerate data generation, exchange, and access at an unprecedented pace and bring security and privacy concerns to the forefront. Cryptographic primitives are canonical and representative problem formulations that capture key challenges in understanding the fundamentals of security preserving techniques, and are essential building blocks for more sophisticated secrecy systems and protocols. This project studies the fundamental limits of a diverse array of cryptographic primitives through network information theory and coding tools. The project will also provide training in this national priority discipline for undergraduate and high school students and cultivate their interests in the STEM fields.The project takes an information theoretic view of the investigation of the fundamental limits of cryptographic primitives. This Shannon-theoretic view, which focuses on the information-theoretic capacity metric and the scaling of data size, is in contrast to most existing cryptography and theoretical computer science studies, which focus on complexity theoretic metrics and the scaling of system size. This project is comprised of three main thrusts: the first thrust focuses on the investigation of the message rate, key storage size, and broadcast bandwidth of broadcast encryption and secure groupcast; the second thrust focuses on the capacity characterization of conditional disclosure of secrets; the third thrust focuses on extending this viewpoint to additional reformulated and new primitives that expand the application of information theory to security. The project is expected to unveil theoretical and practical insights into cryptographic primitives, and enhance the understanding on their fundamental limits.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.