Pietrzak Group
Cryptography
Cryptography, the science of information security, is often relegated to the realm of spies and secret agents. However, we all rely on cryptography on a daily basis, for example when using internet banking or a wireless car key.
The cryptography group at ISTA works on theoretical and practical aspects of cryptography, including:
Crypto for light-weight devices. The team works towards provably secure cryptographic schemes for light-weight devices such as RFID tags, which are too constrained to run existing cryptographic schemes.
Leakage-resilient cryptography. This project aims to construct schemes that are provably secure against “side-channel attacks”. These are attacks in which an attacker exploits information leaked during computation from a cryptographic device like a smart card.
Sustainable Cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is the first successful digital currency. Its popularity comes from the fact that it is decentralized, so no central authority controls it. To achieve security despite decentralization, a huge amount of computing power is constantly wasted towards generating “proofs of work”. This is economically and ecologically problematic. The Pietrzak group works towards more sustainable cryptocurrencies.
Group Leader
On this site:
Team
Current Projects
Leakage-resilient cryptography | Cryptosystems for light-weight devices | Computational entropy | Memory-hard functions | Cryptocurrencies
Publications
Bogdanov A, Cueto Noval M, Hoffmann C, Rosen A. 2022. Public-Key Encryption from Homogeneous CLWE. Theory of Cryptography. TCC: Theory of Cryptography, LNCS, vol. 13748, 565–592. View
Baig MA, Hendler D, Milani A, Travers C. 2022. Long-lived counters with polylogarithmic amortized step complexity. Distributed Computing. View
Avarikioti G, Pietrzak KZ, Salem I, Schmid S, Tiwari S, Yeo MX. 2022. Hide & Seek: Privacy-preserving rebalancing on payment channel networks. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC: Financial Cryptography and Data Security, LNCS, vol. 13411, 358–373. View
Hoffmann C, Hubáček P, Kamath C, Klein K, Pietrzak KZ. 2022. Practical statistically-sound proofs of exponentiation in any group. Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2022. CRYYPTO: International Cryptology Conference, LNCS, vol. 13508, 370–399. View
Alwen J, Auerbach B, Cueto Noval M, Klein K, Pascual Perez G, Pietrzak KZ, Walter M. 2022. CoCoA: Concurrent continuous group key agreement. Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2022. EUROCRYPT: Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptology and Information Security, LNCS, vol. 13276, 815–844. View
ReX-Link: Krzysztof Pietrzak
Career
since 2016 Professor, Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA)
2011 – 2016 Assistant Professor, Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA)
2005 – 2011 Scientific Staff Member, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2006 Postdoc, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France
2005 PhD, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Selected Distinctions
2015 ERC Consolidator Grant
2010 ERC Starting Grant
Additional Information
Download CV
Open Pietrzak group website
Physics & Beyond at ISTA
