In this seminar, we will introduce recent research trends in cryptography. The students will learn how to read/understand research papers and present them to others. We will focus on topics that were presented at recent conferences for cryptographic research. A selection of possible topics is given below:

1. Distributed cryptography, where the cryptographic task (e.g., signing or encryption) is distributed among a large number of machines.
2. Zero-knowledge proof systems to prove that a statement is true without revealing anything beyond the statement.
3. Provable secure countermeasures against side-channel attacks to protect devices against physical attacks exploiting, e.g., the power consumption or running time of a device.
4. Multiparty computation to securely compute a function without revealing anything beyond the output of the computation.

We will present a short introduction to these topics during the kick-off meeting, and provide the students with a list of possible research papers. We will also give some guidelines into how to structure your presentation and provide close guidance in understanding the material of the papers.