March 27, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Abstract
Studying “cryptography in the wild” means finding examples of cryptography being used in standards, products or deployed systems, then analysing them by either finding vulnerabilities and reporting them or by building security models and proofs for the cryptographic cores of these systems. The end result of this kind of analysis is that users gain greater assurance about the security of the systems on which they rely. In this talk I’ll reflect on the methodology by which we conduct this kind of work, what it tells us about how developers see cryptography, and what we can learn from it as a community of researchers and educators.
Register for the lecture here.
Bio
Kenny Paterson is a full professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, where he leads the Applied Cryptography Group (https://appliedcrypto.ethz.ch/). He was Head of Department in 2023 and 2024. Prior to joining ETH Zurich, Kenny was a professor with the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London. Kenny was made a Fellow of the IACR in 2017 for “research and service contributions spanning theory and practice, and improving the security of widely deployed protocols”. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cryptology between 2017 and 2020. He was the conference programme chair for EUROCRYPT 2011 and an invited speaker at ASIACRYPT 2014 and PKC 2017. His research has won several awards, including an Applied Networking Research Prize from the Internet Research Task Force (2014), a PET award for outstanding research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (2015), and best paper awards at NDSS 2012, ACM CCS (2016 & 2022), IEEE S&P (2022 & 2023), CHES 2018 and IMC 2018. He is co-founder of the “Real World Cryptography” series of workshops, which provide a forum for industry and academia to come together to exchange ideas in this rapidly developing field.