The Non-Stop University CRYPTO Olympiad is the only international cryptography Olympiad. It brings together both school and university students, as well as professionals from all over the world. Anyone can take part in the Olympiad, regardless of geographic location. The official language of the Olympiad is English. The goal of the Olympiad is to attract young researchers to solve problems of modern cryptography.
The organizers of the Olympiad are the Cryptographic Center (Novosibirsk), the Mathematical Center in Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk State University, Sobolev Institute of Mathematics SB RAS, KU LEUVEN (Belgium), Belarusian State University, Tomsk State University, Kovalevskaya Center for Mathematical Research.
In 2021, the Olympiad was held from 17 to 25 October.
746 people from 33 countries took part in it. The geography of the Olympiad can be seen on the page
https://nsucrypto.nsu.ru/olymp/2021/
Participants were given 20 problems of varying complexity and topics. We considered both classical cryptographic primitives — ciphers and online machines, passwords and binary strings, cipher components and Feistel schemes — and curious objects of cryptography — quantum circuits, elliptic curves, function masking, implementation of functions on a microcircuit.
The Olympiad traditionally offers complex problems of modern cryptography. This year one of them was the problem of quantum error correction, which aroused great interest of the participants. Also, complex mathematical problems were given that underlie the construction and use of Boolean functions as components of ciphers: the search for special permutations and s-Boolean separation of a function. For example, a special kind of function masking (s-boolean separation) is required to ensure that the cipher using this function is resistant to side-channel attacks, which are currently a very powerful tool for breaking ciphers.
Co-chairman of the Olympiad, lecturer at NSU,
Anastasia Gorodilova says:
The geography of the Olympiad participants continues to grow! During the 8 years of the Olympiad 68 countries took part in it. This year, participants from such new countries for us as Algeria, Iceland, Senegal, Azerbaijan, Niger, South Africa have registered.
Chairperson of the Program Committee, Associate Professor of NSU,
Natalia Tokareva comments:
This year, we carried out a significant update of the system for checking decisions of participants, we are working on improving the system for appealing decisions, and we are expanding the program committee.
The results will be revealed at the end of December 2021.
The Olympiad is supported by the Cryptographic Center (Novosibirsk), the Mathematical Center in Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk State University and Kovalevskaya Center for Mathematical Research.
