Speaker: Ted Chinburg, U. Penn.

Title: I love the smell of crypto in the afternoon.

Abstract: This talk is about a paper with Brett Hemenway, Nadia Heninger and Zach Scherr which will appear in the proceedings of Asiacrypt in Hanoi this December. RSA cryptography is based on the presumed difficulty of factoring a given large integer N. In the 1990's, Coppersmith showed how one could quickly determine whether there is a factor of N which is within N^{1/4} of a given number. Capacity theory originated in studying how charged particles distribute themselves on an object. I will discuss how an arithmetic form of capacity theory can be used to show that one cannot increase the exponent 1/4 in Coppersmith's method.