FSU Computer Science Prof. Viet Tung Hoang recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the amount of $174,469, for his project “CRII: SaTC: Towards Stronger and Verified Security for Real-World Cryptography”.

Today, many real-world cryptographic schemes are based on the provable-security paradigm, certifying their security via some proofs. However, in several important settings, existing proofs for the in-use constructions give weak security bounds, even to the extent that these results are not meaningful. Moreover, many proofs in the literature are buggy, giving false confidence on the security of actually vulnerable constructions. Even worse, practitioners may introduce seemingly harmless optimizations into a secure scheme, only to find out later that they completely undermine the security. In this project, Prof. Hoang aims to partially address these issues from several fronts: (1) improving security guarantees of important applications, (2) weeding out insecure optimizations of real-world protocols by giving attacks, and (3) developing tools for automatic verification of cryptographic proofs.