Subject: [81attendees] IETF 81 - Thursday Speaker Series

From: IETF Secretariat <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2011 12:36:15 -0700 (PDT)

Only 23 days until the Quebec City IETF!
Register online at: http://www.ietf.org/meetings/81/

Thursday Lunchtime Speaker Series

Topic: From Number Theory to Curves: The Advancement of Public-Key Cryptography

Speaker:
  Scott A. Vanstone PhD, FRSC
  Vice President Cryptographic Research
  Research in Motion
  Distinguished Professor Emeritus
  University of Waterloo

Logistics:
  Room 205 ABC
  Thursday, 28 July 2011
  Time: 12:00 - 12:45
  Lunch will NOT be served.

Brief description of topic:
This talk will provide a brief history of commercially viable public-key cryptography. 

Dr. Vanstone will begin with a human interest story of the connection between the 
University of Waterloo and the very famous code breaking facility at Bletchley Park 
in England where ciphers such as Enigma and Lorentz were broken.

The concept of public-key cryptography was first discussed in the open literature in 
the 1975 seminal paper "New Directions in Cryptography" written by Whitfield Diffie 
and Martin Hellman. Although the idea was clear, they had no example which exhibited 
all of the functionality proposed. Shortly after, in 1977, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman 
found a practical realization based on number theory which showed that what Diffie 
and Hellman had hypothesized was in fact possible and, in particular, that digital 
signatures could be created. This method is now well known as the RSA scheme. The 
security of the RSA scheme appears to rest on the difficulty of factoring large 
integers and a problem of interest to number theorists.

In 1985 Koblitz and Miller independently discovered Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). 
ECC provides all of the functionality of the RSA scheme but does it more efficiently 
in both bandwidth and computing power. ECC is ideally suited to constrained 
environments and, in many instances, is the only public-key system that will work here. 
The security of ECC schemes appears to rest on the difficulty of computing discrete 
logarithms on elliptic curves. 

Dr. Vanstone will discuss these systems from their inception to the present day.

Bio of Speaker:
Dr. Vanstone was the founder of Certicom and oversaw all research, which generated 
over 300 patents for the company. After Research in Motion's acquisition of Certicom, 
he joined RIM's Advanced Technology group. Dr. Vanstone is also a Distinguished 
Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. 
Dr. Vanstone devotes much of his research to the efficient implementation of the 
elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for the provision of information security services 
in handheld computers, smart cards, wireless devices, and integrated circuits. 

Vanstone has published more than 200 research papers and a number of books on topics 
such as cryptography, coding theory, finite fields, finite geometry, and combinatorial 
designs. He is a co-author of the Handbook of Applied Cryptography and A Guide to 
Elliptic Curve Cryptography. Dr. Vanstone held the NSERC/Pitney Bowes Senior Chair of 
Cryptography at the University of Waterloo for eleven years and is the Executive 
Director of the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research also at Waterloo.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Academy of Sciences in 1998 and 
received the University of Waterloo Award for Excellence in Research in 2004. In 2009 
Dr. Vanstone received the Ontario Premier's Catalyst Award for Lifetime Achievement in 
Innovation. Also in 2009 he retired from the University of Waterloo after 35 years on 
faculty and was awarded Distinguished Professor Emeritus.

Scott Vanstone has a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Waterloo.