"Security Sleuths: UC San Diego Computer Scientists' Solutions to Security Issues Withstand the Test"
The cybersecurity research presented in five papers by computer scientists in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering Security and Cryptography group at UC San Diego has been credited for changing the present and future of their respective fields. This year, five Test of Time Awards were won by UC San Diego researchers and their teams for their lasting contributions to security and cryptography. Professor Daniele Micciancio received the 2022 Test of Time Award for his 2002 contribution "Generalized Compact Knapsacks, Cyclic Lattices, and Efficient One-Way Functions from Worst-Case Complexity Assumptions" at the 63rd IEEE Symposium on Foundations in Computer Science. Micciancio's research revolutionized lattice-based cryptography, an essential area of post-quantum cryptography aimed to protect classical computers from quantum computer attacks. His paper demonstrated that lattice-based cryptography has enormous theoretical and practical effects. He showed that lattice-based cryptography could be both secure and efficient under worst-case complexity assumptions, a feat never accomplished by number-theory-based cryptography. The paper boldly proposed a conjecture on the worst-case hardness of "algebraically structured" lattices, rigorously proved that such hardness gives rise to similarly structured average-case hardness, and argued that this structure allows rapid implementation on modern microprocessors. The methodologies presented in this paper have evolved and expanded into a vast body of work, influencing numerous future findings in the field. This article continues to discuss the UC San Diego computer scientists' solutions that won awards for their impact on security and cryptography.