In 2021, the International Cryptography Olympiad
Non-Stop University CRYPTO was dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Cryptographic Service of the Russian Federation and was held online in two independent rounds: individual and team. In the first round,
Aleksey Shiryaev from the Specialized Educational and Scientific Center of Novosibirsk State University received an honorary diploma in the "schoolchildren" category, and
Konstantin Romanov, a student of the Department of Information Technologies of NSU, was awarded a third degree diploma in the "students" category. In the second round, a team of students from the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics (DMM) and the Department of Physics of NSU consisting of
Rinchin Zapanov,
Artem Sadykov and
Ilya Odud received a third degree diploma. In total, 32 participants were awarded prizes and diplomas in the first round, and 40 teams from 17 countries were awarded in the second round.
The tasks of the Olympiad included both tests that did not require special training, as well as tasks based on complex mathematical apparatus and programming. The program committee consists of specialists from Russia, the USA and a number of European countries who are experts in various fields of cryptography, so the questions raised are of practical importance and are relevant at the moment.
Anastasia Gorodilova, co-chairman of the Olympiad program committee, senior lecturer at the DMM NSU, said:
The main idea of the Olympiad is to involve participants in solving open problems. This year was no exception, and two of these open problems already got new developments. So, the problem of finding a special partition of a function was partially solved — a new sufficient condition for its existence was found. This task is relevant for masking data in order to protect the cipher from attacks through third-party channels. Another problem is related to the search for an error correction scheme for quantum communication channels. A qualitative scheme has been proposed, in which the number of complex operations is reduced, during which accuracy is lost.
The sponsors of the Olympiad are NSU, the Cryptographic Center (Novosibirsk), the Mathematical Center in Akademgorodok, the North-West Center for Mathematical Research. Sofia Kovalevskaya.
