Three Unwritten Papers in Symmetric Cryptography

Abstract: People usually give talks about papers they’ve written. I thought it would be fun to turn that around and talk about papers that I didn’t write. I’ll reach into the distant recesses of memory to identify three problems in symmetric cryptography that I once thought would make for good papers, but that I never pursued. They failed to materialize not because I got stuck, but just because, you know, we don’t do everything we think of doing. I won’t tell you here what the three non-papers are about, because that would spoil the surprise.

Bio: Phillip Rogaway is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at UC Davis. He received his BA from UC Berkeley and his PhD from MIT under Silvio Micali, and subsequently worked as a security architect at IBM Research.

Together with Mihir Bellare, Rogaway pioneered practice-oriented provable security, transforming cryptographic design through precise security definitions and concrete, quantitative reductions. He is a co-developer of OCB, PMAC, RSA-OAEP, and RSA-PSS. His broader contributions span authenticated and nonce-based encryption, format-preserving encryption, the random-oracle methodology, and the XEX construction underlying XTS disk encryption. He has also written extensively on the ethical dimensions of cryptography and the responsibilities of computer scientists, notably in “The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work.”

Rogaway is an IACR Fellow. His honors include the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, the inaugural Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography, the RSA Conference Award in Mathematics, and the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Award.

The lecture is part of the 2nd Workshop on Generic Attacks and Proofs in Symmetric Cryptography (GAPS2), organized by Prof. Elena Andreeva.