Viewing computer science through the lens of cryptography
On Friday 30 September 2022 Christian Schaffner will give his inaugural lecture as professor in theoretical computer science at UvA. He has been fascinated by cryptography since childhood and specializes in quantum cryptography. This year he also became the new group leader of IvI's research group Theory of Computer Science (TCS). Inaugural lecture. 'To simply illustrate what cryptography is about, I will speak during my inaugural lecture a few sentences in Swiss-German', says Christian Schaffner , himself of Swiss descent. 'Then I know that only the few Swiss people in the audience will understand me, but non-Swiss people not.' Of course, speaking in Swiss-German in general is not so safe after all if you only want to communicate with one person, but it illustrates the point. Schaffner: 'You choose a form of encoding and you open a channel of communication with whomever can decode it.' In his inaugural lecture entitled 'A cryptographic view on computer science' Schaffner views computer science through the lens of cryptography, touching on theoretical concepts like the difficulty of solving computational problems and how these are used in a cryptographic context. Cryptography goes back millennia in history. In the middle of the 20th century, the invention of the computer revolutionized the field. However, the predicted arrival of the quantum computer will give cryptography a completely new twist, and that's the focus of Schaffner's own research. Important current cryptographic standards that allow us to do secure online banking or shopping can be cracked with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer. 'This is not just a problem in the future', says Schaffner, 'but it is already a problem now.' How can that be?
