Brown CS News

Held annually since 1987, Eurocrypt is widely considered one of the leading international conferences on all aspects of cryptology. This year’s event was held from May 10-14 in Rome, Italy, and Brown CS faculty member Anna Lysyanskaya closed the first half of the May 12 sessions by delivering an invited talk on the history of her field: “Fifty years of modern cryptography”.

In this talk, Anna laid out the history of cryptography, starting with Diffie and Hellman’s breakthrough paper in 1976 that introduced the idea of public-key encryption and authentication and, in the ensuing years, paved the way to secure online communications. Ever wondered why it’s safe to send your credit card information when making an online purchase? Over the last fifty years, cryptographers have developed the tools that make these kinds of secure transactions possible. Anna made the case that there are a lot of other cryptographic technologies making their way down the pipeline, but it takes a long time from the initial theoretical insight to practical adoption by billions of people.

Anna has been a Brown CS faculty member since 2002. A key theme of her research is balancing privacy with accountability, and she’s known for her foundational research in this area. Camenisch-Lysyanskaya signatures, which she co-created, provide the cryptographic basis for anonymous credentials, which allow users to prove that they possess required attributes without revealing any other information, such as personal identifiers. Her work has been incorporated into the Trusted Computing Group's industrial standard, served as the theoretical foundation for IBM Zurich's Idemix project, and informed the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC).

On both sides of the Atlantic, governments are working on creating digital identity apps that citizens can use in order to prove their identity or identity attributes, and Anna’s work on anonymous credentials has paved the way for such apps to be privacy-preserving. In her Eurocrypt keynote talk, Anna outlined the path that these cryptographic tools have taken to develop so far, and laid out her vision of how they should become the default way to handle electronic identities and credentials, similarly to how the 1976 invention of public-key cryptography paved the way to secure online communications that enable Internet commerce.

Anna’s accomplishments and service to her profession have been well-recognized in her field. Most recently, she was elevated to the rank of International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) Fellow, received the Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography and was named an Identity 25 Digital Pioneer.

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.