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Using card shuffling to show that nobody can decrypt my hard drive

Student-Run Research Seminar

Speaker: Hans Oberschelp, UC Davis
Location: 3106 MSB
Start time: Wed, Feb 15 2023, 12:00PM

These days, most individuals and organizations like to use algorithms like RSA and AES to encrypt their data. These algorithms are fast and seemingly uncrackable, but how do you know there isn't some secret faction of shadowy mathematicians that have developed algorithms to decrypt data encoded with RSA or AES? You don't. That's because RSA and AES have not been proven to be secure. However, there ARE algorithms out there that have been rigorously shown to be (with reasonable limitations on an adversary's resources) impossible to decrypt (with high probability). One way to develop such algorithms is to imagine ways to shuffle a deck of cards. If you can find a way to shuffle a deck so that nobody can tell which cards go where, then you can adapt your shuffle into a cipher in which nobody can tell how to decrypt your ciphertext.



Pizza at 11:50am.