Talk at the Liceo Scientifico G.B. Quadri, Italy, 2024.

Outreach activity by Massimo Ostuzzi.

On October 28th and 31st, Massimo Ostuzzi gave a presentation titled “Modern Cryptography: Past, Present, Future” to five different high school classes of the Liceo G.B. Quadri in Vicenza, Italy. 

The talk was an introduction to public key cryptography in general. Massimo explained the type of cryptography used in the recent past, why it will soon no longer be secure and what countermeasures the cryptographic community is developing. 

The presentation was interactive and the students could test themselves the hardness of the pre-quantum hardness assumptions, specifically the integer factorisation and the discrete logarithm.  

Massimo continued by illustrating the Quantum Threat, giving intuition on why Shor’s algorithm invalidates both of these hardness assumptions.

Following this, Massimo introduced the new, supposedly quantum-safe hardness assumptions, mainly focusing on the ones based on lattices and isogenies between elliptic curves. Again, he tried to give the students a feeling about why these problems are actually hard.