1/7 RESEARCH STATEMENT

My research area is cryptography, with a practice-oriented theme. The cryptography community has, because of historical reasons, evolved to two largely disconnected groups. The theory side targets prov-able security, offering aesthetically pleasing, rigorously secure results with good asymptotic efficiency. But those products usually have no customers, because their concrete running time is slow, their im-plementations difficult, and most importantly, the problems they solve often not of genuine interest to practitioners. In practice, developers are willing to use heuristics to achieve good performance and reduce engineering effort. My research thus aims to bridge the gap between the theory and practice of cryptography: I’m interested in delivering products of real utility that are theoretically justified, easy to implement, and even significantly faster than heuristic solutions. My research papers have embodied what I call a definition-centric approach. A cryptographic definition models what an adversary is allowed to do for its attacks, and when it successfully breaks the scheme. My thesis is that good definitions will provide clean abstraction boundaries for easy of correct use, and eventually lead to performance improvements. “A problem well-stated is a problem half-solved”, as the adage goes. I stress that getting clean definitions is only the first step; there is still a big gap towards obtaining good solutions. After one nails down the definitional treatment, one has to us