*Date and Location*
27 April 2026, 11:00 -- 12:00 (Attention: Starting time is **:00**)
Universität Bern, Hauptgebäude, Hochschulstrasse 4, Room 206.
*Speaker*
Prof. Stefano Tessaro
University of Washington
*Title*
Practice-Driven Theoretical Cryptography
*Abstract*
A large fraction of modern academic cryptography is organised around
designing primitives and protocols that admit proofs of security within
carefully specified formal models and under well-founded assumptions. Yet
many of the mechanisms that underpin today’s digital infrastructure were
either not developed with these proof frameworks in mind or benefit only
from partial validation within them.
In this talk, I will explain how filling this gap gives rise to a
practice-driven theoretical agenda aimed at establishing the strongest
possible security guarantees for cryptographic mechanisms that are already
deployed or being standardised, without redesigning them to fit current
proof frameworks. I will illustrate how this perspective often leads to new
theoretical questions of broader appeal, including connections to
theoretical computer science more broadly. I will present several vignettes
from our recent work, including research motivated by standardization
efforts in privacy-preserving authentication and distributed cryptography,
as well as an ongoing multi-year program aimed at understanding the
security of block cipher design paradigms – the foundations of modern
symmetric-key encryption standards – through connections to fundamental
questions about randomness and structure.
*Brief bio*
Stefano Tessaro is a Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer
Science & Engineering at the University of Washington and is currently a
Visiting Professor at ETH Zurich. He works primarily on cryptography,
computer security and theoretical computer science. Earlier, he was an
assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara, where he held the Glen and Susanne
Culler Chair. He received a PhD from ETH Zurich in 2010 and held
postdoctoral appointments at UC San Diego and MIT. He has received several
awards for his work, including a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER
Award, a Hellman Fellowship and a Best Paper Award at EUROCRYPT 2017.
---
See you there!
Christian Cachin
---
Christian Cachin email: christian.cachin(a)unibe.ch
Cryptology and Data Security Group web: crypto.unibe.ch/cc
Institute of Computer Science tel: +41 31 684 8560
University of Bern
Neubrückstrasse 10, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland
