Best Cybersecurity Research Paper Revealed

The National Security Agency has announced the winning entry to its ninth annual Best Cybersecurity Research Paper Competition.

The winning paper was written by Yanyi Liu from Cornell University and Rafael Pass, professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech. It expounded a theorem that relates the existence of one-way functions (OWFs) to a measurement of the complexity of a string of text. 

“OWFs are vital components of modern symmetric encryptions, digital signatures, authentic schemes and more,” said an NSA spokesperson. 

“Until now, it has been assumed that OWF functions exist even though research shows that they are both necessary and sufficient for much of the security provided by cryptography.”

Titled On One-way Functions and Kolmogorov Complexity, the winning paper was published at the 2020 IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science. 

The chief of NSA’s Laboratory for Advanced Cybersecurity Research picked the winning entry in a decision informed by the opinions of 10 distinguished international cybersecurity experts who independently reviewed the top papers among 34 nominations.

“One-way functions are a key underpinning in many modern cryptography systems and were first proposed in 1976 by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman,” said an NSA spokesperson.

“These functions can be efficiently computed but are difficult to reverse, as determining the input based on the output is computationally expensive.”

The NSA gave an honorable mention to another paper, Retrofitting Fine Grain Isolation in the Firefox Renderer, written by Shravan Narayan, Craig Disselhoen, Tal Garfinkel, Nathan Froyd, Sorin Lerner Hovav Shacham and Deia ..

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