Physical Security: Quantum and Classical – Overview

Lecturers:
Ulrich Rührmair
Harald Weinfurter

Credits: 3 ECTS

Prerequisites: None

Time and place:

Thursdays, 4.00pm to 5.30pm. (Note: All lectures start by the full hour, not by 4.15pm). Due to the current public health situation, all lectures will be held via Zoom.

Any participants registered at the LMU course catalogue (“LSF”) will be provided with a Zoom link for every lecture via e-mail. Participants can enter the Zoom meetings already a few minutes before the lecture actually begins. If you encounter any problems registering, or any other issues or questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch with the two lecturers via e-mail.

zoom online link

Lecture Overview:

Over the last decades, cryptography and computer security have turned from predominantly military disciplines into scientific areas of high societal relevance: They protect the privacy of citizens, the internet, mobile communications, payment transactions, or safety-critical public infrastructures, among many other things.

Our lecture will show how the exploitation of well-known physical phenomena – both quantum and classical – can help us in constructing new cryptographic schemes and computer hardware with improved security features.

Two exemplary mechanisms we will discuss in detail include, firstly, quantum cryptography, in which the uncertainty principle and no-cloning theorem are exploited to create provable cryptographic security. And, secondly, so-called physical unclonable functions (PUFs), which employ the classical phenomenon of nanometer-scale disorder in order to derive unique and unforgeable fingerprints of physical objects and electronic hardware.

Our lecture will be self-contained, starting with a brief introduction to standard cryptography. It will include some of the latest research results in the fields of quantum cryptography and of PUFs.

Literature:

• Roel Maes: Physically Unclonable Functions: Constructions, Properties and Applications. Springer, 2013.
• Christian Wachsmann, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi: Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs): Applications, Models, and Future Directions. Morgan & Claypool, 2014.
• Christof Paar, Jan Pelzl: Understanding Cryptography: A Textbook for Students and Practitioners.
  Springer, English 2010
  German 2016