Congratulations to assistant professor Peter Scholl, from the cryptography and security group, who has been selected as Sapere Aude research leader 2020 by Independent Research Fund Denmark.
“The Sapere Aude programme is a fantastic opportunity to consolidate my research and develop my skills as a research leader. It is great to see my work being recognized in this way, and I am looking forward to the pleasure of working with the early-career researchers who will be recruited for the project,” says Peter Scholl.
With the title follows a grant of DKK 6.2 million, which Peter will use to expand his research team that will do research in new directions in cryptographic computing and correlated pseudorandomness. The aim of the project is further elaborated below:
Imagine two companies with databases of customers, who wish to identify their mutual customers and build a statistical model to analyse performance, without giving away sensitive customer details. With techniques from modern cryptography, this can be made possible.
Today, the two main methods of such cryptographic computing are called secure multi-party computation and homomorphic encryption. These offer different trade-offs, which make them useful in different contexts, but are also limited due to the additional communication or computational costs needed to perform the computation privately. Two recent developments in cryptography are homomorphic secret sharing and pseudorandom correlation generators, which have unique characteristics and the potential to overcome existing barriers in cryptographic computing.
This project develops the foundations and practice of these techniques, to turn them into mature technologies that enable a much wider range of real-world applications.
In 2020, three researchers from Faculty of Natural Sciences at Aarhus University are appointed Sapere Aude research leaders: Peter Scholl (Computer Science), Claudia Strauch (Math) and Denys Grombacher (GeoScience). More information about the three here: https://nat.au.dk/om-fakultetet/nyheder/nyhed/artikel/tre-nye-sapere-aude-forskningsledere-paa-nat/. Sapere Aude research leaders are particularly talented younger researchers, who are capable of leading more participants in a research project at a high international level. Read about all the 35 newly appointed research leaders and their research ideas, in the portrait gallery at Independent Research Fund Denmark’s website: https://dff.dk/forskningsprojekter/forskningsleder/sapere-aude-forskningsledere-2020 (in Danish).
