12th Workshop on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC 2008)

ECC 2008 is the 12th in a series of annual workshops dedicated to the study of elliptic curve cryptography and related areas.

This year the Workshop was held September 22-24, 2008, Utrecht, The Netherlands and was as proceeded by a summer school on Elliptic and Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography the week before. I spent 6 days in the Netherlands.

I had the chance to attend the summer school and tthe main Workshop.

As the press release states:

Over the past years the ECC conference series has broadened its scope beyond elliptic curve cryptography and now covers a wide range of areas within modern cryptography. For instance, past ECC conferences included presentations on hyperelliptic curve cryptography, pairing-based cryptography, side-channel attacks, voting protocols, quantum key distribution, AES, hash functions, and implementation issues. At the same time ECC continues to be the premier conference on elliptic curve cryptography. It is hoped that ECC 2008 will further our mission of encouraging and stimulating research on the security and implementation of elliptic curve cryptosystems and related areas, and encouraging collaboration between mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers in the academic, industry and government sectors

German-Israeli Minerva School 2008: Arithmetic Geometry and Public Key Cryptography

Durring the summary I participated at the German-Israeli Minerva School 2008. It was as 10-days workshop on Arithmetic Geometry and Public Key Cryptography, organized by Gerhard Frey (Essen) and Moshe Jarden (Tel Aviv) at the Tel Aviv University, 27 July - 4 August, 2008.

In addition the school offered excursion to its participants to Jerusalem (including a guided tour), the the Dead Sea and Massada.

Full list of participants can be found here.

All my expenses were covered by the organisers.

Workshop on Factoring Large Numbers, Discrete Logarithms and Cryptanalytical Hardware

On 22 and 23 April 2008 a workshop on factoring large numbers with NFS and on DL-problems took place at the Institute fuer Experimentelle Mathematik in Essen. The workshop was dedicated to present recent results and exchange ideas in these topics concerning both theory, hard- and software aspects. Organiser was Prof. Dr. G. Frey.

As a member of the Institute fuer Experimentelle Mathematik I participated to the workshop. For me one of the most interesting talks was "Modified Number Field Sieve algorithms for oracle-assisted e-th root  extraction and static Diffie-Hellman problems" by E. Thomé.

Workshop on Arithmetic Geometry

On 22 and 23 January 2008 a workshop on Arithmetic Geometry took place at the Institute fuer Experimentelle Mathematik  (IEM) in Essen.

This workshop was dedicated to recent results and an exchange of ideas in Arithmetic Geometry with a special focus on Galois representations and modular forms.

Organisers were G. Frey and G. Wiese.

Prof. Dr. Frey gave a talk called "Hurwitz Spaces Related to Curves of Genus 2 with Elliptic Differentials"

As a member of the Institute fuer Experimentelle Mathematik I participated to the workshop.

I took some photos: