Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

I will give an overview of how lattices in R^n are providing a powerful new mathematical foundation for cryptography. Lattices yield simple, fast, and highly parallel schemes that, unlike many of today's popular cryptosystems (like RSA and elliptic curves), even appear to remain secure against quantum computers. What's more, lattices were recently used to solve a cryptographic "holy grail" problem known as fully homomorphic encryption. No background in lattices, cryptography, or quantum computers will be necessary for this talk -- but you will need to know how to add and multiply matrices.