I’m not a cryptographer. I just read Ogata’s introductory book (which is by the way precise, sparse and cool). So, in many sessions, I was just feeling the depth of the rabbit hole the presenters are investigating.

The talks about attacks were, of course, interesting. Yes, some previous papers in FC conference had bugs in the proofs, and in fact, the proposed schemes can be attacked (that’s where theorem provers can help) [Hartung]. Yes, aviation systems use ancient Roman ciphers (beware, private jet owners) [Smith, Moser, Strohmeier, Lenders, Martinovic]. Yes, you can embed phishing links in pull-request notifications (beware, open source contributors) [In TA 2017: Siadati, Nguyen, Memon]. Yes, some people are social-engineering the social engineers (beware, social engineers) [In TA 2017, Wilson]. Yes, one can read brainwaves to figure out your PIN code (beware, people emitting brainwaves) [Neupane, Rahman, Saxena].

There was a talk about homomorphic evaluation of discrete Fourier transformation [Costache, Smart, Vivek]. My feeling was that the encoding is so aligned to Fourier transformation that most of the Fourier transformation is already done in the encoding. I guessed that’s totally fine.

I loved the session about the blind signatures maybe because the speakers cared to include introductions. That worked great for a person who has just seen ElGamal (me).

I also liked the talk about making NTP securer against off-line attackers [Malhotra, Van Grundy, Varia, Kennedy, Gardner, Goldberg]. The efforts there went into keeping the original message format and semantics to the extent that server implementation needs not change, but yet making the protocol securerer against obvious attack opportunities that were present.

On the smart contract side, I liked a talk about implementing a voting protocol, which requires public announcements and incentives for voters. I also saw people using ProVerif to verify cryptographic protocols symbolically [Bhargavan, Delignat-Lavaud, Kobeissi]. Maybe a compiler from ProVerif-style input into EVM is useful.