Blog

August 19 2008: Gary McGuire (CSI) and Richard Moloney(CSI) visited INTEL to discuss research and implementations in elliptic curve cryptography.

August 18-29 2008: Marcus Greferath (CSI) participated as co-organizer in the CIMPA-UNESCO-TÜBÝTAK Summer School 2008; Codes Over Rings, that took place in the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. He also gave two lectures during this summer school. The titles of these talks were as follows:

Talk 1: Title: On existence bounds on codes over finite frobenius rings – Part I
Date: August 20 2008

Talk 2: Title: On existence bounds on codes over finite frobenius rings – Part II
Date: August 28 2008

July 27- August 4 2008: Richard Moloney (CSI) attended the German-Israeli Minerva Summer School 2008 on Arithmetic Geometry and Public Key Cryptography at Tel Aviv University, Israel.

KULeuven hosts Gary McGuire (School of Mathematical Sciences, UCD)
Visit Duration: 19-22 September 2007

The goal of the visit was Gary McGuire to attend the Coding and Cryptography Contact forum in the Flemish Academy of Science and Art and to give a seminar in COSIC on the following topic: Some Recent Results on Fourier Transforms of Boolean Functions.
Abstract of the talk: We will discuss recent calculations of the Fourier (and Walsh-Hadamard) spectrum of APN functions. We will also talk about a recent analysis of the Fourier spectrum of some monomial bent functions using Stickelberger's theorem. Finally, we will discuss connections between bent functions and almost bent functions via restriction.
The talk was very interesting and was followed by discussions with researchers from COSIC. Garry McGuire also attended the Contact Forum, which took place in Brussels on 20th of September. At the forum he had many discussions and made contacts with scientists from different universities, who are working on Boolean functions. As a consequence of these discussions new research ideas arose and several researchers (including one from Ecrypt partner university) visited the group of Gary McGuire in the School of Mathematical Sciences, UCD. We plan to keep working together and look for new ideas for joint research in the field of Boolean functions with good cryptographic properties.


RHUL hosts Laura Hitt (University College Dublin/Shannon Institute, Ireland)
Visit duration: 15-19 October 2007

The goals of the visit were to discuss open problems in pairings on hyperelliptic curves and cryptographic applications. And also to explore possibilies for future collaboration between Hitt and Galbraith. Laura gave a seminar ‘Hyperelliptic curves in cryptography’ which presented constructions of Frobenius polynomials of pairing-friendly abelian varieties. An open problem is to construct curves whose Jacobians are in such isogeny classes and we discussed this problem and a related problem which arose in the work of Galbraith-McKee-Valenca at Royal Holloway. A reciprocal visit of Galbraith to Dublin is planned for April 2008.


For more information see: http://www.ecrypt.eu.org/webnews/webnews0308.htm

Project Name: Computer Security Tools
Student: Silvian Dragan, NUIM
Grant: €2,000
Awarding Body: NUIM
Duration: June-July 2008

July 2-11 2008: Fernando Hernando (CSI) participated as a session organizer in the SORIA SUMMER SCHOOL ON COMPUTATIONAL MATHEMATICS "ALGEBRAIC CODING THEORY", that took place at the Universidad de Valladolid, Campus de Soria, Spain.

July 6-11 2008: Vitaly Skachek (CSI) attended the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) in Toronto, Canada.

July 7-11 2008: Marcus Greferath (CSI) attended the conference on “Codes, Invariants, and Modular Forms” at the Max-Planck-Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany. The conference was organised by YoungJu Choie, Bernhard Heim, Pieter Moree, Gabriele Nebe and Patrick Sole.

July 22-25 2008: Gary McGuire (CSI) attended the Workshop on Computational Algebra in NUI Galway.

July 21 - August 1 2008: John Sheekey (CSI) attended the First de Brún Workshop on Computational Algebra in NUI Galway.

July 21 - July 26 2008: Rod Gow (CSI) attended the First de Brún Workshop on Computational Algebra in NUI Galway.

July 21 - July 26 2008: Russel Higgs (CSI) attended the First de Brún Workshop on Computational Algebra in NUI Galway.

July 27-30 2008: Gary McGuire (CSI) attended the Applications of Computer Algebra conference at RISC, Austria.

July 27-30 2008: Fernando Hernando (CSI) participated as a session organizer in the Applications of Computer Algebra conference, that took place in RISC, Castle of Hagenberg, Austria. His session title was: "Computer Algebra and Coding Theory.”

July 29 2008: Fernando Hernando (CSI) gave a talk entitled "Matrix product construction for nested codes" at the Applications of Computer Algebra conference at RISC, Austria.

July 28 2008: Gary McGuire (CSI) gave a talk gave a talk entitled “Cyclic codes, APN functions, weight distributions, zeta functions and equivalence” at the Applications of Computer Algebra conference at RISC, Austria.

June 30 2008 – July 25 2008: Richard Moloney (CSI) did a Work Placement in Intel at Shannon. He was working in the MMP Group, managed by Mike Lynch, with Aidan O'Mahony, Pierre Laurent and Caitriona Lucey. He was working on a hardware implementation of ECC using binary Edwards curves.

July 23 2008: Russell Higgs (CSI) gave a talk entitled "Nice error bases and projective character tables"at the First de Brún Workshop on Computational Algebra in NUI Galway