By Christian Stafford

On Friday, December 9^th, 2016, Northeastern University played host to the Charles River Cryptography Day, or, “Crypto Day.” According to Northeastern CCIS Assistant Professor and event organizer, Daniel Wichs, Crypto Day was a day filled with discussions on the latest research and developments in cryptography.

“We invite speakers from all over the world to tell us about what they’re working on. It is a regular event that we hold once or twice each semester and it rotates between several Boston area universities and research institutes,” he said.

Wichs is one of four organizers of the event, along with Yael Kalai (Microsoft Research New England), Vinod Vaikuntanathan (MIT) and Ron Rothblum (MIT).

With cybersecurity matters such as election hacking and website breaches appearing in the news more and more lately, cryptography is a vital topic in today’s digital world.

“Developments in cryptography have the potential to vastly change the way we think about security,” Wichs said. “For example, we now have a rich set of techniques that allows us to perform computations over cryptographically protected data. In other words, you don’t even have to disclose your data to your computer if you’re worried about it being compromised.”

Crypto Day attendees are often focused on the bigger ideas that have the most potential for making a great impact on society, and Boston is definitely the place to be in terms of cryptography research, Wichs said.

“The Boston area is the leading place to do research in cryptography with the highest concentration of researchers in the field that you can find anywhere in the world. Being part of this community is a huge asset for Northeastern and we’re incredibly excited to contribute to it by hosting this event,” Wichs said.

For more information on Crypto Day, visit the event’s website, here.