Beyond the Bytes: Prof. Huck Bennett on Cryptography from Antiquity to Present

Please join us for CS Beyond the Bytes, our Undergraduate Speaker Series! 

Abstract: People have wanted to communicate privately and securely since ancient times, although their schemes for doing so were not always in fact very secure. Fortunately, cryptography---which formalizes the study of secure communication---has developed substantially since then, and this is a good thing. Today, cryptography is at the heart of the internet, electronic commerce, and more. In this talk, we will discuss old, insecure cryptography; private- and public-key cryptography developed in the 20th century (and still in widespread use today!); and modern, 21st-century cryptography that is apparently secure even against quantum computers. The talk will not assume any prior knowledge about cryptography.

Speaker Bio: Huck Bennett is an assistant professor in the computer science department at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research area is theoretical computer science, with a focus on lattices and error-correcting codes.

Before coming to Colorado, Bennett was an assistant professor at Oregon State University from 2021 to 2023. Before that, Bennett was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Michigan and at Northwestern University. He earned his Ph.D. from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University advised by Daniel Dadush and Chee Yap.