Thursday, February 26, 2026 at 6:00 PM until 6:45 PMEastern Standard Time UTC -05:00
An engaging, high-impact 20-minute talk series that connects prospective graduate students with Khoury College faculty and current graduate students. Khoury Sparks showcases cutting-edge research, applied projects, and teaching innovations—highlighting how graduate study at Khoury is exciting, attainable, and deeply connected to the needs of today’s tech industry.
What happens when you apply modern computational power to centuries-old cryptography? This talk will break down the research behind an award-winning project, by Ruby Lo, that transforms the Vigenère Cipher from a historical relic into a modern, lightweight security tool. While the original cipher was restricted to only 26 letters, we'll walk you through how this polyalphabetic substitution re-engineered cipher into a flexible and fully customizable encryption framework, allowing it to secure the complex data strings used by modern connected devices. By prioritizing performance over computational complexity, this research offers a practical solution for resource-constrained devices where standard modern encryption is often too heavy to run. Join this talk to learn how to take a foundational algorithm and rebuild it for a modern technical landscape.