BARC Talk by Elena Pagnin

Progressive Verification for Cryptographic Schemes

Abstract: 
Are you tired of traditional verification methods that leave you in the dark until the very end? Here’s something exciting for you: progressive verification is a framework that allows verifiers to build confidence in the outcome of a verification process in an incremental way. In this talk, I will present our results on progressive verification and its efficiency benefits for digital signature schemes. Our approach not only mitigates unexpected interruptions during the execution of the verification algorithm, but it also allows verifiers to intentionally adjust the soundness of the verification process. Moreover, our technique applies to several lattice-based and multivariate polynomial-based signatures and can be extended to other cryptographic verification schemes (future work). 

From the theoretical perspective, progressive verification (as introduced in this work) draws interesting connections between classical, information-theoretic and post-quantum security notions. Finally, our technique to achieve progressive verification can sidestep computational boundaries by leveraging a one-time set-up phase and amortise the workload over several efficient verification instances.

For more information check out https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/832.pdf (and/or come to my talk!)

Elena Pagnin is an assistant professor at Chalmers University of Technology (Gothenburg, Sweden) since 2022. Prior to that, Elena has been an Associate Senior Lecturer at Lund University (2020-2022), and a Post-doctoral Researcher in the crypto group at Aarhus University (2019-2020).

Elena completed her PhD at Chalmers (Göteborg, Sweden) in 2018 with a thesis on Enhancing Data and User Authentication in Collaborative Settings under the supervision of Prof. A. Sabelfeld and Prof. D. Fiore (IMDEA). Elena holds a Masters degree in Applied Mathematics from University of Trento, Italy, in 2013, which won an award of merit; and a Bachelors degree in Pure Mathematics from University of Padua, Italy, 2010.

Her research is focused on cryptography and security, with a special interest for homomorphic cryptosystems, data authentication and privacy-aware solutions.