Please join us on Tuesday 8th October as we welcome Peter Landrock, Executive Chairman and Founder of Cryptomathic.

The lecture will be held in room 2.41 (second floor) of the Fry Building, followed by a drinks reception which will be held in the School of Maths common room. The event is open to the general public.

Title: The mathematics behind digital signatures

Abstract: Public Key Cryptography as we use it, with billions of transactions being executed every day, was first developed respectively 50 years ago in the case of RSA and modular exponentiation, and 35 years ago in the case of elliptic curves. If quantum computers are developed at a sufficiently advanced level, currently used methods will no longer be considered secure due to Schor’s algorithm.

But the mathematics behind them remains fascinating and is connected to several interesting questions and conjectures in number theory, which is the main focus of the talk. Topics will include short orbits for the discrete logarithm map, and properties of primes that are congruent to 1 modulo 4.