"Real-life cryptography is cooler than Imitation Game-the movie" | Prof. Shweta Agrawal, CSE
Episode Summary
Have you ever wondered why even supercomputers can't crack certain codes? Or why the most secure algorithms are inspired by art?
Watch this episode of Amrut with Prof. Shweta Agrawal as they explore the delicate dance between structure and randomness that keeps our digital world secure. They do a deep dive into how medical research can use private genomic data without compromising privacy, why RSA encryption was a life-changing moment, and how the war effort transformed modern cryptography. (It’s much better than the Imitation Game.)
This is an unmissable episode for anyone interested in mathematics, computer science, cybersecurity, or the future of digital privacy.
Amrut’s Comment
Before I met Prof Shweta for this episode of the Best Place to Build Podcast, my knowledge of cryptography was extremely poor. I knew that I can generate a public-private key pair on my machine, that most coding languages have a sha() function, and that Alan Turing’s team broke the Enigma code (only because I saw the movie, The Imitation Game). She told me that real world cryptography is way cooler than the movie.
Prof. Agrawal was kind to me, she helped me understand concepts like cryptography, its brief history, modern problems in cryptography and much more. We also spoke about Women in Stem, Shweta’s personal decision-making in going to the US to study and coming back to India to work, “atma shraddha,” and art+cryptography.
Don’t miss the part where we share the secret reasons on why CyStar and CFI are named so.
Key Highlights
[00:01:42] Cryptography: What it is and its history
[00:05:10] Cryptography in the Modern World: Why should we care?
[00:07:15] Eavesdroppers and Attackers: Algorithms not people
[00:08:08] Hard Problem: Its definition in cryptography
[00:09:30] Algorithm: What does it mean in cryptography
[00:12:44] P vs NP: The most famous CS problem
[00:17:22] Prof. Shweta’s Research Interests: Computing on encrypted data
[00:25:44] Functional Cryptography: Attributes based and Lattice based cryptography
[00:28:20] Hard Problems: Difference in Engineering vs Computer Science
[00:30:17] Computer Science: Its subfields
[00:34::46] Applicants for Computer Science: Why study it and what should they be good at?
[00:37:30] Computer Science Students: The pressures on them
[00:39:49] Cryptography in India: How has it progressed in the last decade?
[00:41:38] CyStar Center: The internal joke behind the name
[00:46:45] Women in STEM: Prof. Shweta’s views
[00:51:47] Prof.Shweta’s Journey: Education and return to India
[00:57:46] Atma Shraddha: Her interpretation of self-belief in students and society as a whole
[01:03:27] Art and Cryptography: Dialogue between form and formlessness
Institutions mentioned
[00:26:13] IIT Madras
[00:40:13] ISI (Indian Statistical Institute) was the only institution working on public key cryptography when Prof Shweta came back to India
[00:41:46] CyStar is the centre co-founded by Prof Shweta with two other professors.
[00:45:57] The name for CFI (Centre for Innovation) also has a deeper meaning based on Greek constants.
People mentioned
[00:02:17] Alan Turing is considered the “father of computer science” and is famous for his contributions to theoretical computer science, his work in cryptography during World War II, and his role in the development of artificial intelligence.
[00:30:44] Famous computer scientist Edsger W Dijkstra said that calling the field computer science is like calling surgery as knife science
[00:34:08] Professor Balaraman Ravindran said that his first reinforcement learning course 20 years ago had only 6 students
[00:39:25] Steve Jobs talked about how he discovered the first font through taking a calligraphy class
[00:42:53] CyStar center started as a research project that Prof. Shweta and her colleague John Agustine applied for.
[00:43:00] Chester Rebeiro joined CyStar in the second round of funding
[00:51:00] Professor Preeti Aghalayam is the first woman director in IIT
[00:53:34] Prof.Shweta read books written by Stephen Hawking
[01:01:18] Most people in India assume that only Elon Musk can do great scientific innovations like the Hyperloop
Books & Other Media
[00:02:14] The Imitation Game is a movie about the efforts of the British Army to break the Enigma code being used by the German army to send secret messages over the radio.
[00:53:44] The book The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene was a catalyst to Prof Shweta’s desire to find something new and exciting.
Concepts & Models
[00:02:20] The Enigma Machine was a cipher device used by the German military to encode and decode secret messages during World War II.
[00:06:35] Multi-Party Computation Protocol provides a protocol where no individual can see the other parties’ data while distributing the data across multiple parties.
[00:07:41] An Eavesdropper is a particular type of Attacker who passively listens on a channel
[00:07:50] An Attacker could be an algorithm which not only listens but is able to somehow change the information being sent on the channel
[00:08:21] Polynomial Time refers to functions or predicates that can be computed by a Turing machine in a time that is bounded by a polynomial of the input size.
[00:10:25] RSA is a public-key cryptosystem, meaning it uses a pair of keys, one public and one private, for secure communication and data transmission.
[00:12:44] P vs NP is a major open question in computer science and mathematics which asks whether all problems whose solutions can be verified quickly (NP) can also be solved quickly (P).
[00:17:25] Theoretical Cryptography is the science of designing algorithms that are secure to do interesting tasks
[00:18:52] Genomic Data refers to the information about an organism's entire genome, including its DNA sequence, gene structure, and function.
[00:40:35] Crypto and Eurocrypt are the two main publications/conferences for Cryptographers to share their research.
[00:48:50] The Head of the Table experiment was conducted to show gender bias. The experiment consisted of showing two pictures to random subjects - one with a woman at the head of the table and another with a man at the head of the table - and asking who was leading the discussion. When the photo with the woman at the head of the table was shown, 50% of the time the man next to her was identified as leading the discussion.
Prof. Shweta Agrawal is a professor at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in the department of Computer Science and Engineering. She is a Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman Faculty Fellow. Her area of interest is Theoretical Computer Science in general, and cryptography in specific, including post-quantum cryptography. She is also one of the co-founders of the CyStar centre of Cyber Security in IIT Madras.
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