Nature of the program:

Authenticated encryption (AE) schemes provide the dual security services of privacy and authentication, the two most important goals associated with securing data. Currently, authenticated encryption serves us in many aspects of our daily lives, when bulk data needs to be encrypted, say emails or web-pages, the encryption is done by symmetric key encryption mechanisms like an AE.

AE schemes are not new, for over a decade several AE schemes have been proposed, analyzed, implemented and also used in several domains. There has been significant progress in formally defining security of such schemes and in development of techniques to argue about their security. But, the last two years have experienced vigorous activity encompassing various aspects of AE schemes mainly stimulated by CAESAR (Competition for Authenticated Encryption: Security, Applicability, and Robustness).

CAESAR is an ongoing competition which aims to select a portfolio of AE schemes by the end of year 2017. The competition was declared in January 2013, and since then it has received an enormous response from the cryptographic community. Currently, there is a renewed interest in designing new schemes, analyzing existing schemes, fixing and extending security definitions, making schemes robust towards misuses and finally efficient implementations of AE schemes.

This workshop aims to discuss these rapid developments in a comprehensive manner and expect to disseminate these advances to a wide audience. In addition, it aims to identify new research directions related to the field.

The workshop would be self-contained. The basic background required to appreciate the various aspects of AE would be discussed. A tentative list of the background material that would be covered is as follows: Block ciphers, stream ciphers, universal hash functions, security definitions related to symmetric encryption and authentication etc.