Dr. Francesco Sica
Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Science Building (SE-43), Room #270
sicaf@fau.edu
Education
- Ph.D. in Mathematics, McGill University, Canada, 1998
- M.Sc. in Mathematics, Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy, 1993
- B.Sc. in Mathematics, University of Pisa, Italy, 1993
Research Interests
- Public-key cryptography
- Mathematical cryptology
- Number Theory
Research Description
After a PhD in analytic number theory, I joined a crypto lab at the National University of Singapore and then a crypto group at the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium where I worked on the NESSIE project to provide a scientific evaluation of cryptographic primitives in view of their future use in European standards.
My research interests have centered around elliptic curve cryptography, mostly in implementation issues, but recently also in their security (isogeny problem with torsion). I have also published on the use of elliptic curves in pseudorandom number generation, and in multistorage solutions on elliptic curves.
I am also working on integer factorization and am more generally interested in computational problems with a strong number theoretical flavor.
Recent Publications
- F. Sica, Subexponential computation of truncated theta series, Annals of Communications in Mathematics, 8 (3), 425-430 (2025).
- F. Sica, A Proof of the Dimension Theorem for Vector Spaces, Annals of Communications in Mathematics, 8 (2), 299-302 (2025).
- X. Fan, V. Kuchta, F. Sica, L. Xu, Speeding Up Multi-Scalar Multiplications for Pairing-Based zkSNARKs, Journal of Cryptology 38(2), 21 (2025).
- R. Karanjai, S. Shin, W. Xiong, X. Fan, L. Chen, T. Zhang, T. Suh, W. Shi, V. Kuchta, F. Sica and L. Xu, TPU as Cryptographic Accelerator, Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Hardware and Architectural Support for Security and Privacy, HASP 2024, Austin, TX, USA, 2 November 2024.
- F. Sica, Two Remarks on Torsion-Point Attacks in Isogeny-Based Cryptography, Mathematical Cryptology 4(1), 1-10 (2024).
- A.A. Gorodilova, N.N. Tokareva, S.V. Agievich, I.I. Beterov, T. Beyne, L. Budaghyan, C. Carlet, S. Dhooghe, V.A. Idrisova, N.A. Kolomeec, A.V. Kutsenko, E.S. Malygina, N. Mouha, M.A. Pudovkina, F. Sica, and A.N. Udovenko, An Overview of the Eighth International Olympiad in Cryptography 'Non-Stop University CRYPTO'. Sib. Elektron. Mat. Izv., 19(1), A.9-A.37 (2022).
- F. Sica, Factoring with Hints, Journal of Mathematical Cryptology 15, 123-130 (2021).
- X. Fan, G. Gong, B. Schoenmakers, F. Sica, A. Sidorenko, Secure Simultaneous Bit Extraction from Koblitz Curves, Designs, Codes and Cryptography, 87, 1-13 (2019).