Susan Hohenberger, a research professor in the Department of Computer Science, along with co-authors Venkata Koppula, a postdoctoral researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and Brent Waters, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a distinguished scientist at NTT Research, took home a Best Paper Award at CRYPTO 2020, the field of cryptography’s annual international flagship conference. The conference was held virtually in mid-August this year.

The paper, “Chosen Ciphertext Security from Injective Trapdoor Functions,” focused on the security of encryption. Encryption allows one to encode data so it is accessible only by the holder of a secret “key” that can decode the data.

“This is important if, for example, an organization’s data were to be stored in encrypted form on a third-party cloud site,” she said.

Hohenberger’s award-winning work concerns securing encryption against attackers that might try to maliciously tamper with data accessed by the secret key holder.

“The work is fundamental in that it shows systems resistant to such attacks can be built from a basic cryptographic primitive known as a trapdoor function. This problem had been open for many years,” said Hohenberger.

In its 40^th year, CRYPTO is organized annually by the International Association for Cryptologic Research, a non-profit scientific organization whose purpose is to further research in cryptology and related fields.