No próximo dia 13 de Fevereiro de 2020, pelas 14h00 na sala S4 do DCC (FC6 1.46), René Peralta e Luís Brandão irão dar uma palestra intitulada "Randomness Beacons for Enhanced Public Auditability (and some notes on cryptography research at NIST)".
A palestra é organizada pelo DCC-FCUP e pelo grupo de investigação HASLAB-INESCTEC e é aberta a todos os interessados.
Short Bios:
Title
"Randomness Beacons for Enhanced Public Auditability (and some notes on cryptography research at NIST)"
Abtract
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the Unites States advances standards and technology that enhance economic security and improve quality of life. This activity involves international engagement with academia, industry, and governments, to promote innovation in diverse areas of science and technology. We will start this talk with a brief overview of the activity of the Cryptographic Technology Group at NIST, and some of its challenges in computer science and engineering. We will then focus on the “Interoperable Randomness Beacons” project, for which we seek international engagement. A main goal of that project is to promote public randomness as a public good, with the aim to foster public auditability and transparency of services that depend on randomized processes.
A randomness beacon produces timed outputs of fresh randomness, making them perpetually available to the public, in an expected format. NIST has recently published a new reference (version 2.0) for randomness beacons (NISTIR 8213). We expect this will facilitate the implementation of beacons in other countries. Beacons offer the potential to improve fairness, auditability and efficiency in numerous societal applications that require randomness. We will discuss several operational aspects of the beacon reference, including the format of its pulses, and how they relate to security and trust. We will illustrate potential application scenarios of beacon-issued randomness, such as set-partitioning in clinical trials, selection of individuals for audits, and assignment of court cases to judges.
This talk also constitutes an invitation for stakeholders to engage with NIST in new research, including for development of applications of public randomness.