>> To do cryptography, you have to have hard problems.
Unfortunately, the most popular problems that were used as a basis for cryptography are all broken by quantum computers.
If quantum computers become real, we have no more secrets.
>> These vulnerabilities demand a new standard because companies like IBM, Google, and NASA are already developing quantum computers.
Chris Peikert, Computer Science Engineering Professor at the University of Michigan, is constructing a new unbreakable code with lattice cryptography.
>> My group and my collaborators, we were some of the very early pioneers in this area.
The standard that we have submitted, FrodoChem, is what's known as a lattice-based crypto system.
The security of it comes from the apparent difficulty of solving lattice problems.
>> Traditional cryptography has relied on algebraic problems.
Peikert's work, however, lies in the geometric realm.
>> So a lattice is this geometric grid of points that kind of goes out into infinity in all directions
And we use them in very high dimensions, so hundreds or even a thousand or more dimensions.
And the core difficult problem that we rely on is
I present to you a lattice and your goal is to find two lattice points that are relatively close together.
My lab is working on kind of the whole spectrum from the basic mathematics and theory of lattice crypto,
all through implementing it, using it in practice,
which I don't think you'll see in too many other places in the academic world.
Historically, it's taken on the order of about 20 years for new crypto technology
to go from mathematical infancy to being widely deployed.
We don't have to just invent the math and write the papers about it.
We have to build real software systems, we have to get it implemented in hardware,
we have to work out all of the exact parameters, how hard they would be to break.
Even by quantum computers that we haven't build yet.
One reason this may affect people's lives is preventing a sort of security apocalypse.
We need to have started the process and migrated toward cryptography that can prevent that apocalypse now.
