Cryptography

Ronald Rivest helped come up with the RSA algorithm, which safeguards online commerce. Now he’s hoping to make democratic elections more trustworthy.

Researchers have just released hacker-proof cryptographic code — programs with the same level of invincibility as a mathematical proof.

Digital security depends on the difficulty of factoring large numbers. A new proof shows why one method for breaking digital encryption won’t work.

Urmila Mahadev spent eight years in graduate school solving one of the most basic questions in quantum computation: How do you know whether a quantum computer has done anything quantum at all?

A new paper claims that a common digital security system could be tweaked to withstand attacks even from a powerful quantum computer.

Computer scientists can prove certain programs to be error-free with the same certainty that mathematicians prove theorems.

In the drive to safeguard data from future quantum computers, cryptographers have stumbled upon a thin red line between security and efficiency.

A recent cryptographic breakthrough has proven difficult to put into practice. But new advances show how near-perfect computer security might be surprisingly close at hand.

In a watershed moment for cryptography, computer scientists have proposed a solution to a fundamental problem called “program obfuscation.”