Evervault Papers

Crypto means cryptography

The most important cryptography papers spanning the past, present, and future of cryptosystems & cryptology.

Non-Malleable Cryptography

Danny Dolev, Cynthia Dwork, & Moni Naor

On the (Im)possibility of Obfuscating Programs

Boaz Barak, Oded Goldreich, Rusell Impagliazzo, Steven Rudich, Amit Sahai, Salil Vadhan, & Ke Yang

Computer Systems Established, Maintained and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups

David L. Chaum

A Digital Signature Based on a Conventional Encryption Function

Ralph C. Merkle

The Knowledge Complexity of Interactive Proof-Systems

Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, & Charles Rackoffero

Minimal Key Lengths for Symmetric Ciphers to Provide Adequate Commercial Security

Matt Blaze, Whiteld Diffie, Ronald L. Rivest, Bruce Schneier, Tsutomu Shimomura, Eric Thompson, & Michael Wiener

CryptDB: Protecting Confidentiality with Encrypted Query Processing

Raluca Ada Popa, Catherine M. S. Redfield, Nickolai Zeldovich, & Hari Balakrishnan

Protocols for Secure Computations

Andrew C. Yao

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Satoshi Nakamoto

A fully homomorphic encryption scheme

Craig Gentry

On Data Banks and Privacy Homomorphisms

Ronald L. Rivest, Len Adleman, & Michael L. Dertouzos

A fast quantum mechanical algorithm for database search

Lov K. Grover

Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer

Peter Shor

Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer

Peter Shor — Published November 1994

Public-key cryptosystems have been based on the difficulty of two number theory problems: factoring integers (in the case of RSA) or finding discrete logarithms (in the case of elliptic-curve cryptosystems).

In Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer, Peter Shor shows that these problems can be solved in polynomial time on a quantum computer with a small probability of error.

If the only uses of quantum computation remain discrete logarithms and factoring, it will likely become a special-purpose technique whose only raison d'être is to thwart public key cryptosystems.” — Peter Shor

The consequence of Shor’s algorithm is that industry-standard public-key cryptosystems — including RSA & ECDH which are used in TLS, the security protocol behind HTTPS — will easily be broken by quantum computers. NIST is in the process of standardizing public-key cryptography algorithms that are secure against quantum computers.

Once standardized, our aim at Evervault will be to accelerate the deployment of quantum-resistant cryptography to protect data across the web.

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