Inaugural lecture by associate professor Diego F. Aranha.

The talk will be followed by a reception. All interested are welcome to participate. Registration is not necessary.

Title: Cryptography as a Systems Security Problem

Abstract: Cryptography is hard. This common saying applies particularly well when inexperienced developers implement and deploy cryptographic systems on imperfect computing platforms. Because cryptography concentrates risk during the design phase, flaws in its implementation can be catastrophic to overall security. This talk summarizes the main challenges in the field of Cryptographic Engineering, considering cryptography as a Systems Security problem and focusing on the weaker aspects of its attack surface. I will motivate the field with real-world examples of cryptographic failure and take my own contributions to curve-based cryptography as illustration of sound cryptographic engineering. Finally, I will argue the need for extending the techniques to algorithms for obtaining privacy-preserving computation and resistance against quantum computers.

Bio: Diego F. Aranha is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Aarhus University. His professional experience is in Cryptography and Computer Security, with a special interest in the efficient implementation of cryptographic algorithms and security analysis of real-world systems. He received the Google Latin America Research Award for research on privacy twice, and the MIT TechReview's Innovators Under 35 Brazil Award for his work in analyzing and improving the Brazilian electronic voting system. Want to know more about Diego? Read the interview we did with him after he joined the department:https://cs.au.dk/.../meet-associate-professor-diego-f-aranha