Vishal Saraswat received his Ph.D. in Cryptography from University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and has held regular and visiting positions at a variety of institutions, including IIT Jammu, IIT Hyderabad, ISI Kolkata, Univ. of Hyderabad and AIMSCS, Hyderabad. His research interests include anonymity and privacy in communication protocols, searchable encryption for the cloud-based services, lightweight cryptography for IoT devices, post-quantum crypto, active and passive cryptanalysis, and hardware security, topics on which he has published several papers in reputed international journals and conferences. Dr. Saraswat is also a co-author of the book “Introduction to Cryptography”. He has delivered training programs on cybersecurity for various intelligence agencies, defence organizations, academic institutions and policymakers and has supervised several M.Tech and M.S. student projects in cryptography and cryptanalysis in the last several years. He has served on the editorial boards of a number of security and cryptography journals and conferences and is the executive committee member of the Cryptology Research Council of India
Title of talk: Hash-Based Signatures
Abstract: Hash-based signatures are important cryptographic primitives whose security is exclusively based on the underlying cryptographic hash functions, and nothing else. These signatures are among the most attractive constructions of the recent time as they are conjectured to be quantum secure. The basic idea of construction of a hash-based signature is combining one-time signatures like Lamport-Diffie, Winternitz, WOTS+, or few-time signatures like HORST with a Merkle tree-of-trees structure. The recent developments in hash-based signatures are devising stateful and stateless signatures which are realized placing many ‘one-time’ signatures or ‘few-time’ signatures respectively at the bottom of the tree. This talk introduces the basic frameworks and approaches of hash-based signatures.