Research teams

Madynes

Team presentation

The goal of the research project-team is to design, validate and deploy novel management and control paradigms and software architectures able to cope with :

1. the growing dynamicity of both telecommunication infrastructures and services,
2. the scalability issues induced by the ubiquitous Internet.

Research themes

The project addresses two complementary areas :
The first one, called Autonomous Management, focuses on the evolution of management paradigms in order to establish the foundation and the basic infrastructure for autonomous management solutions. Following research topics are addressed in this direction :

• the design of models and methods enabling self organization of management entities,
• the evaluation of communication architectures based on peer-to-peer and application level routing principles together with novel approaches to the representation of management information,
• modeling and benchmarking of management infrastructures.

The second area, called Functional areas extends the above foundations through three of its major functional areas, namely :

• security : new key distribution protocols and infrastructures for privacy,
• service configuration and provisioning : automation of processes ranging from service subscription to service deployment and service activation,
• measurment and analysis : automated instrumentation, tuning, monitoring and measurment models for end-to-end service quality assesment.

The Next Generation Internet is the main application field of our research. Its architecture and the services that it is planed to support offer all dynamic and scalability features that we address in the two research directions of the project.

The site  : http://madynes.loria.fr/

The inria description : http://www.inria.fr/en/teams/madynes

Carte

Team presentation

The aim of the CARTE research team is to take into account adversity in computations, which is implied by actors whose behaviors are unknown or unclear. We call this notion adversary computation. The project combines two approaches, and we think that their combination will be fruitful. The first one is the analysis of the behavior of a wide-scale system, using tools coming from Continuous Computation Theory. The second approach is to build defenses with tools coming rather from logic, rewriting and, more generally, from Programming Theory. The activities of the CARTE team are organized around two research actions: Computer Virology. Computation over Continuous Structures

Research themes

There are three main research directions :

1. Computer virology : We study model of viruses, self-modifying programs, and heuristic to detect malware
2. Model of computation over reals and dynamical systems
3. Implicit computational complexity

The site : http://carte.loria.fr/ (in french)

The inria descrition : http://www.inria.fr/equipes/carte

 

Caramel

Team presentation

A general keyword that could encompass most of our research objectives is arithmetic. Indeed, in the CARAMEL proposal, the goal is to push forward the possibilities to compute efficiently with objects having an arithmetic nature. This includes integers, real and complex numbers, polynomials, finite fields, and, last but not least, algebraic curves.
Our main application domains are public-key cryptography and computer algebra systems. Concerning cryptography, we concentrate on the study of the primitives based on the factorization problem or on the discrete-logarithm problem in finite fields or (Jacobians of) algebraic curves. Both the constructive and destructive sides are of interest to this proposal. For applications in computer algebra systems, we are mostly interested in arithmetic building blocks for integers, floating-point numbers, polynomials, and finite fields. Also some higher level functionalities like factoring and discrete-logarithm computation are usually desired in computer algebra systems.
Since we develop our expertise at various levels, from most low-level software or hardware implementation of basic building blocks to complicated high-level algorithms like integer factorization or point counting, we have remarked that it is often too simple-minded to separate them: we believe that the interactions between low-level and high-level algorithms are of utmost importance for arithmetic applications, yielding important improvements that would not be possible with a vision restricted to low- or high-level algorithms.

Research themes

We emphasize three main directions for our project:

• Integer factorization and discrete-logarithm computation in finite fields
  We are in particular interested in the number field sieve algorithm (NFS) that is the best known algorithm for factoring large RSA-like integers, and for solving discrete logarithms in prime finite fields. A sibling algorithm, the function field sieve (FFS) is the best known algorithm for computing discrete logarithms in finite fields of small characteristic. In all these cases, we plan to improve on existing algorithms, with a view towards practical considerations and setting new records.
• Algebraic curves and cryptography
  Our two main research interests on this topic lie in genus 2 cryptography and in the arithmetic of pairings, mostly on the constructive side in both cases. For genus 2 curves, a key algorithmic tool that we plan to develop is the computation of explicit isogenies; this will allow improvements for cryptography-related computations such as point counting in large characteristic, complex-multiplication construction and computation of the ring of endomorphisms. For pairings, our principal concern is the optimization of pairing computations, in particular in hardware, or in constrained environments. We will develop automatic tools to help in choosing the most suitable (hyper-)elliptic curve and generating efficient hardware for a given security level and set of constraints.
• Arithmetic
  Integer, finite-field and polynomial arithmetics are ubiquitous to our research. We consider them not only as tools for other algorithms, but as a research theme per se. We are interested in algorithmic advances, in particular for large input sizes where asymptotically fast algorithms become of practical interest. We also keep an important implementation activity, both in hardware and in software.

The site  : http://caramel.loria.fr/index.en.html

The inria description : http://www.inria.fr/en/teams/caramel