On the Sixth International Olympiad in Cryptography NSUCRYPTO

TL;DR

The paper presents problems and solutions from the sixth NSUCRYPTO cryptography Olympiad, highlighting research challenges in cryptographic attacks, protocols, and mathematical countermeasures, fostering engagement of young researchers in advanced cryptography.

Contribution

It introduces a collection of unsolved research problems and their solutions from the 2019 Olympiad, emphasizing cryptographic research and educational engagement.

Findings

Partial solution to hash function Curl27 collision problem

Discussion of open problems in side-channel attack countermeasures

Presentation of cryptographic problems involving ciphers, hash functions, and polynomials

Abstract

NSUCRYPTO is the unique cryptographic Olympiad containing scientific mathematical problems for professionals, school and university students from any country. Its aim is to involve young researchers in solving curious and tough scientific problems of modern cryptography. From the very beginning, the concept of the Olympiad was not to focus on solving olympic tasks but on including unsolved research problems at the intersection of mathematics and cryptography. The Olympiad history starts in 2014. In 2019, it was held for the sixth time. In this paper, problems and their solutions of the Sixth International Olympiad in cryptography NSUCRYPTO'2019 are presented. We consider problems related to attacks on ciphers and hash functions, protocols, Boolean functions, Dickson polynomials, prime numbers, rotor machines, etc. We discuss several open problems on mathematical countermeasures to side-channel attacks, APN involutions, S-boxes, etc. The problem of finding a collision for the hash function Curl27 was partially solved during the Olympiad.