Projet DEREC: Development of Relativistic Cryptography

The goal of project DEREC is to demonstrate the feasibility of guaranteeing the security of some cryptographic protocols using the relativistic paradigm, which states that information propagation is limited by the speed of light.

We plan to study some two party primitives such as bit commitment and their security against classical and quantum adversaries in this model. We then plan to the integration of those primitives into larger cryptosystems. Finally, we plan on performing a demonstration of those systems in real life conditions.

We will focus on secure multiparty computation, with applications such as voting schemes, secret auctions, or password-based authentication schemes. Our final goal is to implement these protocols, with proven security, at the end of the 4-year project so that they can be deployed on a larger scale in the 5 to 10 years to come. We limit ourselves to a few tasks in this project for pragmatic reasons but the potential benefits of relativistic cryptography go far beyond them.