Shun Watanabe is an Associate Professor of Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology and the Society’s Distinguished Lecturer for the years of 2023 and 2024. He had also been an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, and a General Co-chair of the 2021 IEEE Information Theory Workshop. He is a Board of Governor of the Society. This lecture was hosted by the Society’s Guangzhou Chapter and the School of Electronics and Information Technology of SYSU. More than 40 scholars and students participated the lecture. The participants also included several industrial experts from Huawei and Shanghai AI Lab.

The lecture was moderated by Professor Li Chen of SYSU, Chair of the Society’s Guangzhou Chapter. Li gave an opening speech, welcoming the lecturer and all participants. This distinguished lecture addressed the information-theoretic cryptography. Although the computational cryptography has been widely used in practice, its security relies on certain computational assumptions. The information-theoretic cryptography seeks to build protocols that are secure without any assumptions on adversary's computational power. This has been actively studied since the landmark paper by Shannon. In fact, some of the information-theoretic concepts and tools have been used in the computational cryptography that is more often seen in practice. During the lecture, Shun first provided an overview for information-theoretic cryptography, followed by a few technical tools including the min-entropy, universal hash family and leftover hash lemma. He then introduced secure computation and oblivious transfer and showed how to realize the simulation based security against active adversary. Finally, he shared some open problems in the area. More details could be found in his recently published textbook (Himanshu Tyagi and Shun Watanabe, "Information-theoretic Cryptography," Cambridge University Press, 2023).

This lecture has shown the deep insights and challenges in the area of information-theoretic cryptography. It has inspired active discussions between the lecturer and the participants. Before the lecture concluded, a group photo was taken in commemorating this Society event in East Asia.