The main objects of study in this thesis are abelian varieties and their endomorphism rings. Abelian varieties are not just interesting in their own right, they also have numerous applications in various areas such as in algebraic geometry, number theory and information security. In fact, they make up one of the best choices in public key cryptography and more recently in post-quantum cryptography. Endomorphism rings are objects attached to abelian varieties. Their computation plays an

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... role in explicit class field theory and in the security of some post-quantum cryptosystems. There are subexponential algorithms to compute the endomorphism rings of abelian varieties of dimension one and two. Prior to this work, all these subexponential algorithms came with a probability of failure and additional steps were required to unconditionally prove the output. In addition, these methods do not cover all abelian varieties of dimension two. The objective of this thesis is to analyse the subexponential methods and develop ways to deal with the exceptional cases. We improve the existing methods by developing algorithms that always output the correct endomorphism ring. In addition to that, we develop a novel approach to compute endomorphism rings of some abelian varieties that could not be handled before. We also prove that the subexponential approaches are simply not good enough to cover all the cases. We use some of our results to construct a family of abelian surfaces with which we build post-quantum cryptosystems that are believed to resist subexponential quantum attacks - a desirable property for cryptosystems. This has the potential of providing an efficient non interactive isogeny based key exchange protocol, which is also capable of resisting subexponential quantum attacks and will be the first of its kind.