# 15th IMA International Conference on Cryptography and Coding

IMA-CCC (Facebook) is a crypto and coding conference biennially held in the UK. It was previously held in Cirencester. So you might have heard of it as the “Cirncester” conference. However, it has been moved to Oxford, so calling it Cirencester now is a bit confusing. Anyway, it is happening again this year. IMA is a small but fine conference with the added perk of being right before Christmas. This is great because around that time of the year Oxford is a fairly Christmas-y place to be.

# Sage Code for GGH Cryptanalysis by Hu and Jia

Recently, Yupu Hu and Huiwen Jia put a paper on the Cryptology ePrint Archive which describes a successful attack of the GGH (and GGHLite) candidate multilinear map. The attack does not try to recover the secret $g$ or any other secret parameter of the map. Instead, it solves the Extraction $\kappa$-graded CDH (Ext-GCDH) problem directly.

# Friday Afternoon Fun

It is Friday and all teaching is done for the week. Also, it has been about 10 days since the FREAK attack was made public. Hence, the most natural idea is to scan the Internet for hosts that are still vulnerable and mining their Ps and Qs. After all, the tools for the job are readily available. Here’s what we found.

# Google Summer of Code 2015

Both Sage and the Lmonade project were selected for Google’s Summer of Code 2015. If you are an eligible student, you should consider applying. If you need ideas what to work on, there are many fine projects/project ideas on either the Lmonade or the Sage GSoC pages. In particular, here are the fplll project ideas, for which I could be one of the two mentors.

# Sage Development with Emacs

A while back I described my (then current) setup to develop C code with Emacs. The other programming language I tend to spend a lot of time with is Python, specifically Sage’s Python. Here’s my Emacs setup for writing Sage code. For starters, it makes sense to highlight indentation in Python.

(use-package highlight-indentation
:ensure t)


I use anaconda-mode for auto-completion and stuff, it runs jedi for me. In particular it offers:

• M-. Goto definition for thing at point.
• M-, Switch to buffer of most recent marker.
• M-? Show documentation for context at point.
• M-r Show usage for thing at point.
(use-package anaconda-mode
:ensure t
:diminish anaconda-mode
:config (bind-key "M-," #'anaconda-nav-pop-marker anaconda-mode-map))


# On the concrete hardness of Learning with Errors

Together with Rachel Player and Sam Scott (both also from the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London) we finally managed to put our survey on solving the Learning with Errors problem out. Here’s the abstract:

The Learning with Errors (LWE) problem has become a central building block of modern cryptographic constructions. This work collects and presents hardness results for concrete instances of LWE. In particular, we discuss algorithms proposed in the literature and give the expected resources required to run them. We consider both generic instances of LWE as well as small secret variants. Since for several methods of solving LWE we require a lattice reduction step, we also review lattice reduction algorithms and use a refined model for estimating their running times. We also give concrete estimates for various families of LWE instances, provide a Sage module for computing these estimates and highlight gaps in the knowledge about algorithms for solving the Learning with Errors problem.