SBSeg 2007

Well, I arrived in Rio last saturday to attend SBSeg 2007, the national conference on computer security. It encompasses a few different events, amongst them the one that interests me the most, the Workshop on Cryptographic Algorithms and Protocols (WCAP). Being a Workshop, there is no actual presentation of original work, so if you are publishing something it's probably on SBSeg, not on WCAP. But usually a handful of quite impressive lecturers come to speak at WCAP, and it is always a nice opportunity to hear what they have to say. It's pretty hard trying to keep yourself up-to-date without being able to attend almost any conference at all because they are so damn far away, so it's nice for a change that something actually goes on around here. So, this year, we were supposed to have five speakers: Carlile Lavor (UNICAMP), Paulo Barreto (USP), Michel Abdalla (ENS, Paris), Benoît Libert (UCL, Belgium) and Claude Crépeau (McGill University, Canada). The main topics were pairing-based cryptography (Michel and Benoît) and quantum computing/post-quantum cryptography (Carlile, Paulo and Claude). Unfortunately the very competent people of the travel agency that made the arrangements for the international speakers never mentioned to prof. Crépeau that he'd need a visa to come to Brasil, so he never made it here, which is a real pitty because I feel his talk would've been really good. On the first day we had lectures by profs. Carlile, on the basics of quantum computing, and Paulo Barreto, on a few of the available options for doing cryptography in a way suposed to be resilient to quantum computers (after all, the two main "hard problems" underlying most of modern cryptography, namely factoring and the discrete log problem, can be solved easily in quantum computers). That was really interesting too and it seems to provide quite a few interesting research opportunities. The next day we had lectures by Benoît Libert, once again by Paulo (filling in for Crépeau) and Michel. Benoît and Michel both did pretty interesting suveys of the most significant results in provably-secure pairing-based cryptographic protocols (which is sort of the theme of my master thesis, so that was specially cool for me). The last day had more talks on pairing-based protocols and more results, most of which I wasn't aware of. But I'd say the best part of the conference wasn't the lectures in themselves (even though, I finally can say that I sort of understand what the hell quantum computing is all about), but the people you meet and the opportunity to discuss various things with such well-known and respected researchers. That was really amazing, and I gotta admit it felt a little frustrating to not be going for a PhD right away, because this would've been a great chance to work something out... but, I mean, who's in a hurry?!?! Of course I'd get hesitant being here and being so into it all, but I'm still pretty sure I made the right choice by working next year, specially since I had the opportunity of working somewhere I'd always dreamt about... but I gotta admit the prospect of going somewhere like ENS and working in such an amazing crypto group kinda made it all a pretty hard decision.