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SIAM Conference on Applied Algebraic Geometry 2019 - Isogenies mini-symposium

So here we are in the nice city of Bern, in the Teutonic Switzerland, for SIAM Conference on Applied Algebraic Geometry 2019 that this year counts more than 750 attendees! The weather is warm enough but the isogenies topic has never been so hot! So for this occurrence of the conference Tanja Lange, Chloe Martindale and Lorenz Panny managed to organise a really great isogenies mini-symposium spread over 4 days.

Day #1

Day #1 started strong, after a quick overview of isogenies by Chloe Martindale and Lorenz Panny including  an introduction to SIDH and CSIDH the invited speakers took the stage:
This concluded Day #1 

Day #2

In Day #2 we had
  • David Jao discussing recent progress in implementing isogeny-based cryptosystems in constant time to resist side-channel attacks. Result covered in one of his recent paper (joint work with Jalali, Azarderakhsh and Kermani). One of the interesting observation made was that isogeny computation over Edward curves is relatively simple to be implemented in constant time  (as expected) but it is faster only for isogeny degree being equals/greater than 5. He concluded his talk with some really great demos (as also reported by Thomas Decru in a second blog post).
  • Christophe Petit surveyed known results on the security of isogeny-based protocols including the celebrate active attack on SIDH.
  • Frederik Vercauteren gave the first of two sessions dedicated to CSI-FiSh (joint work with Beullens and Kleinjung).  This part had as a focus the  new record class group computation they achieved while computing the class group structure of CSIDH. It seems they reused some of the code previously written by Kleinjung and for the final computation of the closest vector in the lattice Léo Ducas gave an hand. While the technique used for the computation was standard was still a remarkable big task involving several core years. He concluded the talk with a nice list of open problems.
  • David Kohel presented a joint work done with his student Leonardo Colò that was recently published at  NutMiC 2019. This construction called OSIDH (that stands for oriented supersingular isogeny Diffie-Hellman) is built on top of O-oriented supersingular elliptic curves (as define in the paper).

Day #3

Day #3 of isogenies opened with the plenary session delivered by Kristin Lauter. Her talk, as usual, was really inspiring and was about the history of Supersingular Isogeny Graphs in Cryptography. She basically covered the Charles-Goren-Lauter (CGL) hashing construction and the panorama of post quantum cryptography. After a quick break and a commuting to the other building we were back to the isogenies mini-symposium:
  • Thomas Decru presented a new CGL type genus-two hash function (joint work with Wouter Castryck and Benjamin Smith). The reformulated a previous construction by Takashima (broken by Yan Bo Ti and Victor Flynn) by using genus-two superspecial subgraphs.
  • Jean-François Biasse talk was about algorithms for finding isogenies between supersingular elliptic curves. He showed that under some circumstances the generic Grover algorithm might beat the more isogeny specific Tani algorithm. This talk was also covered by a Thomas Decru's blog post.
  • Benjamin Wesolowski talked about his systematic approach to analyse horizontal isogeny graphs for abelian varieties. He covered some neat theorems he proved (in a joint paper with Brooks and Jetchev) and concluded saying that his results would not be enough to say anything about the CSIDH case but as we will see in the next talk they are extremely useful in the higher genus cases.
  • Dimitar Jetche's talk was a natural following of the previous talk. He was focusing on vertical isogenies instead and announced a possible solution to the  DLP on genus 3 hyperelliptic curves.

Day #4

And here we arrived already to last day:
  • Ward Beullens delivered the second part of the CSI-FiSh paper (here there is as well a blog post about it). In this part he focused on the identification scheme/signature part including the Zero Knowledge and the optimization part
  • Florian Hess tried to give an answer to an open problem posed in a recent paper about multiparty non-interactive key exchange. Namely his talk was about the possibility of building an invariant maps from isogenies. His conclusions were not really positive at least so far.
  • Luca De Feo brought a new topic to the isogeny World: #blockchain! He presented a new Verifiable Delay Function construction based on Supersingular Isogenies and Pairings (joint work with Simon Masson, Christophe Petit and Antonio Sanso). Despite the isogenies the construction is not quantum resistant due the usage of pairing. A blog post about this construction can be found here.
  • Jeff Burdges talked about some real word application of isogenies, including an hybrid scheme that might be used in mix networks, consensus algorithms in blockchain and encrypt to the future to be employed in auctions.
That's all from SIAM AG see you in 2 years.

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