You use it in your mobile phone, you use it
in your credit card, you use it when you get
money out of the wall, you use it ubiquitously
all the time
Alice wants to communicate with Bob. They
also agree on a secret key. Imagine Bob is
Amazon and Alice is you And Eve is the eavesdropper
and she’s trying to snooping on the communications
and they can agree on the key by doing what’s
called the Diffie-Hellman key exchange which
is the simplest cryptographic protocol.
So Alice send Bob ‘g to the a’ and Bob
sends Alice ‘g to the b’ and they can
both compute ‘g to the ab’ but Eve sitting
in the middle, she sees ‘g to the a’ and
‘g to the b’ is unable to come up with
the secret key ‘g to the ab!
Everyone uses cryptography all the time, we
truly have an amazing impact on the real world.
The university of Bristol has a very large
cryptography research group consisting of
about 30 researchers, 6 academics, about 14
Phd students and 10 post-docs and we research
the whole of cryptography from very very applied
stuff to do with electronics to right the
way through with very very deep mathematics.
And we are one of the largest research groups
purely dedicated to cryptography on the entire
planet.)
The thing that’s really exciting in cryptography
at the moment is this thing of computing an
encrypted data, which the university of Bristol
is leading. So the basic application, typical
application would be is that you’re able
to encrypt your email on the Google server
and Google is still able to search it for
you even though they don’t know what the
content of the email is. That’s like an
amazing application and we can do it because
of but we can’t do it yet but we will be
able to do it because of the research being
done within Bristol.)
So the use of cryptography in the real world
and our impact at Bristol has been quite widespread.
We’ve worked with banks on their inter-bank
communication securing transfer of money.
We’ve worked with the chip and pin system,
which has been used in credit card transactions.
We’ve been one of the main drivers behind
the next generation of cryptographic protocols
for the chip and pin systems and we’ve been
involved in a number of start-up companies
around the world transferring our technologies
and our concepts into products and services
in the real world benefiting different companies
and consumers.
Cryptography is a war between attackers and
defenders. So on one hand, we’re attackers
and on the other hand, we are defenders. We
have to play both sides, so we are Schizophrenic
researchers who have to be both good and bad
at the same time!
