The latest research direction of cryptography theory can be reflected in the papers of CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT and ASIACRYPT. Next, there are different top-level conferences according to different theoretical directions, such as TCC(Theory of Cryptography) of pure cryptography, PKC(Public Key Cryptography) of applied cryptography, ESORICS of applied cryptography, FSE of fast encryption, ACSAC of physical security and so on.
The top conferences of cryptography application are CCS, security and privacy, and Usenix security. According to different application requirements, there are also security-related papers in meetings in different computer fields. Such as INFOCOM, MOBICOM in communication field, Sigmund, VLDB, ICDE in SIGCOMM database field, etc. After all, information security is all-encompassing, and the research direction of security is gradually emerging in the field of computer data.
Let's go back to the topic: the research direction and representative figures of public key cryptography. The basic theory of public key cryptography has been monopolized by several people, and there are all kinds of cooperation between them. I don't intend to introduce the basic concepts of various fields here, because it is too troublesome and abstract to define. I only give nouns, and interested friends can start searching.
The traditional public key cryptosystem, which we call RSA, ElGamal encryption and signature, is the research result of thirty years ago. At present, the research content of traditional public key cryptography mainly focuses on the construction of encryption schemes with secure ciphertext. The grandfathers in this field are Cramer and Shoup. Subsequently, various security schemes were proposed to meet this requirement. Recently, around 2007, the direction of scholars is a selective open and secure public key encryption scheme. Because there is no authoritative translation of this noun, I dare not turn it around. The authority on this is Bellare. It is worth noting that in this field, China scholar Lai published a paper on EUROCRYPT 20 14, which is a very celebratory event in the field of cryptography in China.
Next is functional encryption. Function encryption used to be based on bilinear mapping, but now it is extended, as I will say later. The leading figure of functional encryption is Professor Boneh of Stanford University whom I admire very much. Boneh basically dominates public key cryptography, and many of the representatives behind him are his students or their students. He first proposed identity-based encryption, then he and his students studied many encryption schemes with multiple functions, and finally unified them and defined them as functional encryption. In functional encryption, an interesting encryption scheme is attribute-based encryption, which is a practical encryption scheme in existing cloud storage security, so it is listed separately. The representative of this sub-field is Waters.
Search encryption. This kind of encryption can be divided into single key searchable encryption and public key searchable encryption. I don't know much about single keys. Public key searchable encryption is a special case of function encryption, which is called ciphertext attribute hidden encryption, so I won't list the direction separately. It is worth noting that Boneh is also the initiator of public key searchable encryption.
Followed by homomorphic encryption. This is an encryption mode that may change the development of computers. My tutor is the constructor of homomorphic encryption and may be a candidate for Turing Prize. The originator of homomorphic encryption is Gentry, a student of Boneh, but I feel that he has surpassed shine on you. Homomorphic encryption is now based on lattice-based cryptography. Now, on the one hand, researchers have further constructed a more efficient homomorphic encryption scheme, on the other hand, they have turned to a new cryptographic tool: the construction and application of multilinear mapping. This is the hottest research direction of public key cryptography.
Some people will say why there is no signature. Now the signature scheme has been integrated into the function encryption. In fact, there is a general construction of signature scheme based on function encryption. That is, the function encryption that meets the conditions can be transformed into an equivalent signature scheme.
As for quantum cryptography, it is not my research direction, and I dare not give a specific hot spot.
There are many other aspects, such as secure multi-party computing, multi-party key agreement and so on.