Description:

With technology growing at its fastest ever, new and groundbreaking computing systems come up everyday. Artificial Intelligence can not only understand your queries but can also (sort of) create a profile for you from your queries and details you provide it. These data-points act as plus one to its already vast knowledge base.

In most cases, a user sets their password such that it contains a significant date, part of name, family name, etc. Systems like GPT4, Bard, etc can essentially predict password using the data points it has on you. In general it’d take 5 years, to break a password of 10 characters with one uppercase letter, number and symbol using sheer brute force. But with significantly smaller search space (only the user’s significant data) to apply brute force on, that wait time is significantly reduced. Now that’s the case with binary computers - bring in Quantum Computers, that time becomes even shorter significantly.

There are many encryption algorithms that are proposed to be the standard for being quantum-resistent, but that is still a bit far. Until these are much more widely used and are considered standards (like AES) , we can make use of existing cryptosystems and sandwich them together to create Hybrid cryptosystems that can provide significant improvements over just the standalone ones.

Such a crypto system is the combination of AES, RSA and Blowfish with additional key security with LSB Steganography. Here, a plaintext is encrypted thrice using the three mentioned algorithms in a sequential format, that makes the resulting cipher text significantly harder to break. The keys that are used by the three algorithms are then hashed, encrypted and embedded into media (preferably image) using Least Significant Bit Steganography. This makes provides additional security to not only the data, but to the keys as well. This is implemented using Python due to its extensibility and significant usage in data manipulation and mathematics.

Agenda: - What is Cryptography ? - Some Popular Cryptographic Systems/Algorithms - Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) Algorithm - Advanced Encryption Standard - AES - Cryptographic Hashing Algorithms - SHA1 - Steganography - Pitfalls of current standards - What are Hybrid Cryptosystems ? - Architecture - AES-RSA-Blowfish Hybrid Cryptosystem - Code Walkthrough and Demo (in Python) - Alternatives - Lattice based cryptosystems

Prerequisites:

Basic Knowledge of Cryptography and basic Mathematics is good to have but not mandatory.

Content URLs:

Link for Paper : https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanmoysg/overlay/1635467729576/single-media-viewer/?profileId=ACoAACKs-BIBQxiL4o9BrArvjyW620Y0jY4s91Y Link to Code: https://github.com/TanmoySG/hybrid-encryption/blob/main/hybrid-encryption.ipynb

Speaker Info:

I am Tanmoy Sen Gupta. I'm a Software Engineer at Optum - a UnitedHealth Group company, working in the Data Platform Team. A Computer Science Engineer by education, I'm skilled at Golang, Python, JavaScript, React, Docker, K8s, among others and have a keen interest in Theoretical Computer Science and Cryptography.

Speaker Links:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanmoysg/ GitHub: https://github.com/TanmoySG/ Personal Website: https://tanmoysg.com/ Blogs on Substack: https://substack.com/@tanmoysg