Hemant Pendharkar (Computer Science) has recently completed a competitively awarded faculty fellowship with SPAWAR (Space and Naval Warfare)System Center Atlantic, which, according to its website, delivers “information warfare capabilities” for the Department of the Navy. Its areas include cyber encryption, cyber surveillance, and cybersecurity, among other “tactical and business information technology capabilities.”
Pendharkar has co-authored two papers as a result of the research collaboration with SPAWAR, both concerning lattice-based cryptology. They will be presented at two upcoming national conferences and subsequently published.
At the 2016 MAA Joint Mathematics Meeting, Pendharkar and his SPAWAR colleagues, Scott C. Batson, Tuwaner Hudson Lamar, Georgianna L.T. Campbell, and Kayla A. Capitan, will present “The Suitability of Lattices for Project-based Introductions to Cryptology.” The paper calls for more lattice-based cryptology courses to be added to the curriculum for computer science majors, and also focuses on a lattice-based cryptology research project that demonstrates the benefits that the subject would have for undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty.
Another paper produced by this team, “An Experiment Investigation into the Practical Performance of Lattice Reduction Algorithms on Ideal Lattices,” is to be presented at the 2017 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Conference on Computational Science and Engineering in Atlanta, Ga. The paper “presents preliminary results from an analogous experimental study performed to assess the practical performance of lattice reduction algorithms on ideal lattices” and predicts the performances of these lattices in addition to identifying their limitations.
The project and papers were sponsored by the United States Department of Defense.