Privacy and Number-Theoretic Cryptography

Alfred Menezes (University of Waterloo) Hugh Williams (University of Calgary) Privacy is a fundamental right of people living in a law-abiding society, and cryptography is a fundamental tool for privacy-enhancing technologies. Due to ongoing and inevitable threats from criminals and terrorists, it is important that mechanisms for providing privacy not interfere with the legitimate duties of law enforcement agencies. This project has two goals: To foster the research of privacy-enhancing policy and technologies; and Studying fundamental cryptographic primitives and protocols, with an emphasis placed on number-theoretic objects including finite fields, elliptic curves, hyperelliptic curves, algebraic function fields, and algebraic number fields.