
What are some innovative encryption methods? - ask2sk
A friend of mine is doing PhD and in-need of some latest and innovative encryption methods for the thesis. Could anyone please recommend something?
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benwilber0
Not exactly "innovative", since it's one of the oldest encryption methods, but
the One-Time Pad[0] is considered "perfect encryption" and proven to be
unbreakable. The mere possibility of unbreakable encryption could fill up a
thesis by itself.

[0]
[http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/laws/pad.html](http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/laws/pad.html)

<strike>edit to clarify: "unbreakable" is the wrong word, since it could be
brute-forced with enough time and energy, like any encryption method.</strike>

yes it is completely unbreakable.

~~~
kabdib
No, one-time pads are really unbreakable. You can't tell if the key you
generated, which yielded "ATTACK AT DAWN", decrypted to the real message. It
might have been "HN != SLASHDOT" \-- all decrypts are equally likely.

~~~
benwilber0
edited thanks. he even explicitly said that it was unbreakable in the article
I linked :-).

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sweis
Your friend is not going to get PhD thesis topics by asking his friend to post
on HN.

Regardless, here's what I think are interesting areas in recent crypto:

\- Performance improvements in fully homomorphic encryption, starting with
Gentry's work in 2009.

\- Practical applications of secure multiparty computation, e.g. Dyadic
Security and Google's SMC work.

\- Non-NIST standards with actual adoption like Curve25519 and
Chacha20-Poly1305

\- Functional Encryption:
[http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/543](http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/543)

\- Post-quantum crypto like New Hope
([https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1092](https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1092)) and
Supersingular Isogenies
([http://eprint.iacr.org/2011/506](http://eprint.iacr.org/2011/506))

\- Candidate functions for Multilinear Maps, e.g.
[https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/610](https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/610)

\- Hardware-based secure enclaves like SGX

~~~
drmeena
Hellow sweis, actually he is posted for me, due to some technical issues I
could not. how can u say that I can't get thesis topic? and thank you for your
reference links.

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INTPenis
Innovative methods of gathering entropy is interesting to me. Because
encryption methods are pretty darwinian. The good ones are heavily used and
the quirky/bad ones fall into disuse.

But methods of gathering entropy can range from a microphone recording a city
street to the classic keyboard/mouse.

Both are valid, but not as practical.

Personally I have the OneRNG, an open source usb-stick that gathers entropy by
generating RF noise.

There are other devices like that out today.

------
loourr
Zero knowledge proofs [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-
knowledge_proof](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof)

~~~
bonyt
Expanding on that, zk-snarks[0], a kind of non-interactive zero-knowledge
proof[1] are really interesting. They're used as the basis for the anonymous
cryptocurrency zcash[2], where one can prove they haven't already spent an
input without actually revealing which input they are spending.

[0]:
[https://z.cash/technology/zksnarks.html](https://z.cash/technology/zksnarks.html)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-interactive_zero-
knowledge...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-interactive_zero-
knowledge_proof)

[2]: [https://z.cash/](https://z.cash/)

------
mofojed
Post-quantum key exchange using ring learning with errors and hybrid
solutions:
[https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/599.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/599.pdf)

~~~
DanGarcia595
This is really cool! I know Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman has a patch
to build the cipher suite into OpenSSL [0] like the paper you linked. I know
that Microsoft Research also has the best known implementation of SIDH [1]. Do
you know of any paper studying the performance of those two?

[0] [https://github.com/dconnolly/sidh-for-openssl-
patch](https://github.com/dconnolly/sidh-for-openssl-patch)

[1] [https://github.com/Microsoft/PQCrypto-
SIDH](https://github.com/Microsoft/PQCrypto-SIDH)

~~~
mofojed
The closest paper I can find comparing performance would be this one (section
3.4 for performance):
[https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1017.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1017.pdf)

Check out the Open Quantum Systems implementation, they've got a suite
incorporating a number of quantum resistant algorithms:
[https://github.com/open-quantum-safe/liboqs](https://github.com/open-quantum-
safe/liboqs)

They have the SIDH implementation you mentioned ([https://github.com/open-
quantum-safe/liboqs/blob/master/docs...](https://github.com/open-quantum-
safe/liboqs/blob/master/docs/Algorithm%20data%20sheets/kex_sidh_cln16.md)),
and a test harness for comparing performance.

~~~
DanGarcia595
Really great stuff. Thanks!

------
omginternets
Obligatory mention of homomorphic encryption [0].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption)

~~~
Arubis
I initially read this as “homeopathic encryption”, and was prepared to be very
amused! Expected something along the lines of “the input is subjected to a
random bit flip approximately once per 10kB; amongst practitioners, this is
considered more effective than the unnecessarily heavyweight approach taken by
Western-style encryption schemes.”

~~~
CiPHPerCoder
Oh, I think you're thinking of homeopathic KDFs. Homeopathic encryption users
just use the Crystalline cipher, because it helps center our chakras.

------
DanGarcia595
Post-Quantum Cryptography using Supersingular Isogenies:
[https://eprint.iacr.org/2011/506.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2011/506.pdf)

------
Cieplak
Cryptography with Cellular Automata:

[http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/cryptogr...](http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/cryptography-
cellular-automata.pdf)

~~~
sweis
Nobody uses anything related Wolfram's cellular automata. I don't think there
are any robust security proofs.

------
DanBC
I'd like to see more analysis of things like CHAFFINCH.

[https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/Chaffinch.html](https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/Chaffinch.html)

~~~
ask2sk
Hi, thank you. it seems novel. can you please elaborate it, could it be
applied for biometric authentication!

------
badrabbit
Identity based encryption.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID-
based_encryption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID-based_encryption)

"Identity-based systems allow any party to generate a public key from a known
identity value such as an ASCII string. A trusted third party, called the
Private Key Generator (PKG), generates the corresponding private keys...."

I think it's innovative and a bit of "thinking outside the box". You do need
to ultimately trust a 3rd party (same as in PKI or WOT I guess?).

------
probinso
Shamir Secret Sharing is very cool and fairly old. It introduces a tool that
inspires many neat applications.

There is a lot of interesting work in privacy preserving databases as well.

------
pizza
functional encryption
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_encryption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_encryption)

------
vectorEQ
i think this is pretty cool ,and getting more relevant now quantum computers
are comming closer...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McEliece_cryptosystem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McEliece_cryptosystem)

------
ask2sk
Thanks everyone. I have forward all your ideas and suggestions to my friend.

