Semester project at EPFL

This is a project I worked on during the spring semester of 2024, which I spent abroad at EPFL. The work is titled "An overview on different preimage-sampling algorithms in lattice cryptography" and consists of a comparison of three methods for preimage sampling based on the original method proposed by Micciancio and Peikert in 2012.

Sadly, I can't say I am 100% satisfied with the final shape of this work, for two reasons.

First of all, I discovered during this project that I don't particularly enjoy lattice cryptography, which made working on this project harder than it was meant to be. In retrospect, given my successive interest in zero-knowledge cryptography and the fact that I worked on this project with Giacomo Fenzi who was at the time a PhD student of Alessandro Chiesa, it would have been a better choice to ask for a project in zero-knowledge, however at the time I didn't know much about ZK cryptography.

The second reason is that close to the deadline of the project we had to change its scope, which was meant to be much more ambitious: the original idea was to try and adapt the results of another article to a signature scheme on which G. Fenzi was working at the time.

Either way, I do believe that working on this project, as well as the general experience at EPFL, gave me a much more solid background on cryptography and research, and helped me realize which fields of cryptography I want to specialize in.