About
I am a CNRS research scientist at IRIF, Université Paris Cité. I received my PhD from École Normale Supérieure de Paris (ENS) in November 2017, under the supervision of David Pointcheval and Hoeteck Wee. In 2017 – 2019, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), in the team of Dennis Hofheinz.
My main research interests are secure multiparty computation and zero-knowledge proofs (both foundational and practical aspects), as well as the theoretical foundations of cryptography. For an up-to-date list of my publications, you can check my publication page, my dblp profile, or my Google scholar profile. All my publications become available at some point in open access format on the ePrint archive; see the list here. My PhD thesis can be found here.
News
March 2024 I defended my Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches on March 20. An HDR is a French diploma needed to supervize PhD students (without it, a co-supervisor with HDR is required). It proceeds essentially like a second PhD defense. You can find my HDR manuscript here; it provides an overview of secure computation in the correlated randomness model, and a step-by-step introduction to pseudorandom correlation generators, which might be useful for anyone wanting to get into this research area. More information about the defense here.
September 2023: I was awarded an ERC Starting Grant for my project OBELiSC (Overcoming Barriers and Efficiency Limitations in Secure Computation). See here and here for interviews where I explain (in French) the goals of the project, and here for a short abstract (still in French).
June 2023: I was invited to deliver a Spotlight Talk to the 2023 Conference on Information-Theoretic Cryptography (ITC). My talk, titled On Correlated Pseudorandomness, covered pseudorandom correlation generators, their impact on secure computation, and some of the latest advances in the area. You can check the slides here.
April 2022: Our Eurocrypt’22 paper, On Building Fine-Grained One-Way Functions from Strong Average-Case Hardness, has been invited to the Journal of Cryptology. In this work, we prove weak feasibility results and strong barriers for basing extremely limited forms of cryptography on powerful average-case hardness assumptions. Working on this paper has been a long, but thrilling journey with my amazing coauthor, Chris Brzuska.
January 2022: We just completed a book chapter for an upcoming book with Elette Boyle, Niv Gilboa, and Yuval Ishai. It is an up-to-date overview of homomorphic secret sharing, function secret sharing, and some of their many applications (including pseudorandom correlation generators). Check it out!
Resources
This website contains a few posts which might be useful to students in cryptography, gathered in the blog section. It includes in particular:
- A LaTeX template for writing research papers in cryptography;
- A probability cheat sheet, with basic tools and results that I believe should be part of the cryptographer’s toolbox;
- A Q&A section, where I gathered some of my answers to common questions on the cryptography stackexchange.
Students and postdocs
I have the pleasure to advise several amazing PhD students, and I will not be accepting any new PhD requests in the next year or so. However, I have openings for postdocs. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, secure computation, zero-knowledge proofs, post-quantum cryptography, code-based cryptography, and foundational aspects of cryptography (including black-box separations and connections to learning theory).
If you are interested, send me a mail and consider applying to the openings of the Algorithm and Complexity team of IRIF (the deadline is November 1st, 2023 – but if you missed it, you can still ping me).
Postdocs
| Time period | Notes | |
|---|---|---|
| Sihang Pu | Apr. 2024 – current | |
| Christop Egger | Oct. 2022 – current | |
| Alexander Koch | Oct. 2022 – current | |
| Balthazar Bauer | Oct. 2022 – Sep. 2023 | Now holding the Chaire de Professeur Junior at UVSQ. |
| Sven Maier | Nov. 2022 – Mar. 2023 |
PhD students
| Time period | Notes | |
|---|---|---|
| Bui Dung | Oct. 2021 – | Secure Computation for Privacy-Preserving Analysis of Medical Data |
| Clément Ducros | Oct. 2021 – | Linear Codes for Quantum-Resistant Secure Computation (co-advised with Alain Couvreur) |
| Eliana Carozza | Oct. 2021 – | Quantumly hard algebraic problems and their advanced cryptographic applications (co-advised with Antoine Joux) |
| Ulysse Léchine | Oct.2021 – | Average-case hardness, entropy, and one-way functions (co-advised with Thomas Seiller) |
| Pierre Meyer | Sep. 2020 – Sep. 2023 | Secure computation with constrained communication (co-advised with Elette Boyle). Now postdoc at Aarhus University, supervised by Claudio Orlandi. You can check Pierre’s PhD thesis here. |
Master students
| Time period | Notes | |
|---|---|---|
| Alexandros Themelis | Apr. 2024 – Sep. 2024 | Advanced Post-Quantum Signatures |
| Bui Dung | Mar. 2021 – Aug. 2021 | Batch equality tests and secure comparison from pseudorandom correlation generators |
| Clément Ducros | Mar. 2021 – Aug. 2021 | Secure computation meets linear-time encodable codes |
| Michael Reichle | Feb. 2020 – Aug. 2020 | Efficient range proofs with transparent setup from bounded integer commitments. Michael’s work led to a paper, presented at EUROCRYPT’21. Now postdoc at ETH Zurich under the supervision of Dennis Hofheinz. |
| Dominik Hartmann | Feb. 2019 – Aug. 2020 | Compilers for non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs. Dominik’s work led to a paper, presented at CRYPTO’20. Now PhD student at Ruhr Universität Bochum. |
Other: visitors, interns, bachelor students
| Time period | Status | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Willy Quach | Feb. 2024 – May 2024 | Visting postdoctoral researcher | |
| Kelsey Melissaris | Feb. 2024 – Jun. 2024 | Visting postdoctoral researcher | |
| Nikolas Melissaris | Feb. 2024 – Jun. 2024 | Visting PhD student | |
| Sacha Servan-Schreiber | Sep. 2023 – March 2024 | Visiting PhD student | |
| Elahe Sadeghi | Jun. 2022 – Jul. 2022 | Visiting PhD student | Elahe’s work led to a paper, presented at EUROCRYPT’23. |
| Milan Gonzalez-Thauvin | May 2021 – Jul. 2021 | Internship | Constructions of Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge Proofs: Efficiency and Generality |
| Maryam Zarezadeh | Nov. 2020 – Apr. 2021 | Visiting PhD student | Non-interactive inner products from LPN. Maryam’s work led to a paper, presented at ASIACRYPT’22. |
| Elahe Sadeghi | Jul. 2020 – Oct. 2020 | Internship | Statistical ZAPs from group-based assumptions. Elahe’s work led to a paper, presented at TCC’21. |
| Pierre Meyer | Nov. 2020 – Jan. 2020 | Internship | Breaking the circuit size barrier for secure computation under quasi-polynomial LPN. Pierre’s work led to a paper, presented at EUROCRYPT’21. |
| Sebastian Faller | Oct. 2018 – Feb. 2019 | Bachelor | Lattice-based implicit zero-knowledge arguments. Now PhD student at ETH Zurich under the supervision of Dennis Hofheinz and Julia Hesse. |
| Michael Reichle | May 2018 – Sep. 2018 | Bachelor | Non-interactive keyed-verification anonymous credentials. Michael’s work led to a paper, presented at PKC’19. Now postdoc at ETH Zurich under the supervision of Dennis Hofheinz. |
| Samuel Kopmann | Nov. 2017 – Mar. 2018 | Bachelor | Improved designated-verifier non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments |
Program Committees
The list of conferences, workshops, and journals where I served as a member of the program committee (conferences, workshops) or editorial board (journals).
| Year | Venues |
|---|---|
| 2024 | Communications in Cryptology, TCC |
| 2023 | CSF, CRYPTO |
| 2022 | PKC, CSF, SCN, TCC |
| 2021 | EUROCRYPT, IWSEC, WAHC |
| 2020 | EUROCRYPT, IWSEC, WAHC |
| 2019 | TCC, WAHC |
| 2018 | INDOCRYPT |