Encrypting to a Mathematical Fact | Theoretically Speaking

When people think of encryption, they typically imagine a plaintext being encrypted so that only someone with the correct cryptographic key can decrypt it. In this talk, Sanjam Garg will discuss a different kind of encryption scheme, where a plaintext can be encrypted to a puzzle or, more generally, to any mathematical fact. Anyone who can solve the puzzle or prove the fact can recover the plaintext. This talk traces the evolution of this idea and highlights recent developments that are making such techniques increasingly practical and relevant to real-world deployments.

Sanjam Garg is an Associate Professor at UC Berkeley. His research interests are in cryptography and its applications to security and privacy. He obtained his PhD from UCLA in 2013 and his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 2008. Garg is the recipient of various honors such as the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, the Sloan Research Fellowship, and the IIT Delhi Graduates of Last Decade Award. Garg's research has been recognized with a Test of Time Award at FOCS 2023, and best paper awards at EUROCRYPT 2013, CRYPTO 2017, EUROCRYPT 2018, and TCC 2025. Past students and postdoctoral researchers from Garg's research group are now faculty/researchers at top institutions, such as Columbia University, Brown University, the University of Toronto, and Microsoft Research.

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