Cryptography is the ancient science of encoding messages so that only the sender and receiver can understand them. Cryptography is now available to everyone thanks to the development of modern computers, which can perform more mathematical operations in a second than a human being could do in a lifetime. An ordinary PC can produce codes of such complexity that the most powerful supercomputer using the best available attack algorithms would not break them in a million years. Cryptography is used to secure telephone, Internet, and email communication and to protect software and other digital property.

The Cryptography group within Microsoft Research serves multiple roles:

• Researching new cryptographic methods and applications.
• Working with standards bodies to develop security protocols.
• Providing internal security consulting on Microsoft products.

People

Manager: Kristin Lauter, Principal Researcher

Long-Term Visitors

• Christiane Peters, Technical University of Denmark
• Christian Rechberger, Ecole Normale Superieure
• Vanessa Teague, U. of Melbourne (07/18/11 - 08/05/11)
• Leo Reyzin, Boston U. (07/11/11 - 07/22/11)
• Kirsten Eisenträger, Penn State (06/20/11 - 07/15/11)
• Sean Hallgren, Penn State (06/20/11 - 07/15/11)
• Yevgeniy Dodis, NYU (June 2011)
• Thomas Ristenpart, U. of Wisconsin (June 2011)
• Andrey Bogdanov, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (3/21/11 - 5/13/11)
• Christian Rechberger, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Oct. 2010, Jan. 2011)

Past visitors

Short-Term Visitors (2013, 2012)

• Raluca Ada Popa, MIT
• Ran Gelles, UCLA
• Martijn Stam, University of Bristol
• Sarah Meiklejohn, UC San Diego
• Olivier Peirera, Universite Catholique de Louvain
• Peter Ryan, University of Luxembourg
• Barbara Simons
• Anna Lysyanskaya, Brown
• Kevin Fu, University of Michigan
• Thomas Ristenpart, University of Wisconsin
• Sharon Goldberg, Boston University
• Claus Diem, University of Leipzig (07/02/12 - 07/06/12)
• Ivan Visconti, University of Salerno (06/11/12 - 06/15/12)
• Sanjam Garg, UCLA (04/30/12 - 05/04/12)
• Brett Hemenway, University of Michigan (04/23/12 -  04/27/12)
• Femi Olumofin, Pitney Bowes (04/19/12)
• Eleanor Birrel, Cornell (03/1/12)
• Olya Ohrimenko, Brown (02/21/12 - 02/22/12)
• Sarah Meiklejohn, UC San Diego (01/30/12 - 02/03/12)

Past visitors

Interns

News

• Alice and Bob in Cipherspace (American Scientist)
• The Trash Attack
• Cryptanalysis of the Full AES!
• A Cloud that Can't Leak (MIT Tech. Review)
• Considerations for the Cryptographic Cloud (HPC in the Cloud)
• Security in the Cloud (Comm. of the ACM)
• Factorization of RSA-768!
• Security in the Ether (MIT Tech. Review)
• Video: searchable encryption (MIT Tech. Review)
• Searching an encrypted cloud (MIT Tech. Review)

Events

• Crypto Colloquium
• Summer Number Theory Day (July 24, 2012)
• Workshop on Symmetric Cryptanalysis (August 8-10, 2011)
• Workshop on Elliptic Curves and Computation (October 18-22, 2010)
• Workshop on Cloud Cryptography (August 5 & 6, 2010)
• Workshop on Voting Technology (March 19, 2010)