CWI cryptographer Ronald Cramer has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant of 2.5 million euro for his proposal 'Algebraic Methods for Stronger Crypto' in March 2017. He leads the Cryptology Research group at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam and is a full professor at the Mathematical Institute of Leiden University. The European Research Council (ERC) awards these most prestigious personal grants to outstanding, well-established scientists with novel ideas towards high-risk, groundbreaking research that impacts both science and society at large.
Ronald Cramer is known for his fundamental contributions to cryptography, such as the Cramer-Shoup encryption, which is adopted in an international ISO standard, and for the hash proof systems building on this research. Other examples are his work on cryptographic protocol theory (such as the Sigma protocols), and mathematical aspects of secure multi-party computation – cooperation between parties that do not trust each other – including arithmetic secret sharing and connections with algebraic geometry. In recent years, he also focused on the mathematics of 'quantum-safe crypto'.
Since June 2004, Ronald Cramer (1968) has been the head of the Cryptology research group at CWI, and a full professor at the Mathematical Institute of Leiden University. In 1998 Cramer received the (first) Christiaan Huygens Prize from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) for his PhD thesis of 1996. In 2003 he delivered the Distinguished Cryptographer Lecture Series at NTT Research in Tokyo. He was awarded a Vici grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) in 2006. From 2005-2010 he was a member of the inaugural class of the Young Academy of the KNAW. In 2011 he was an Invited Speaker at the 30th EUROCRYPT conference. In 2013, Cramer was selected Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) for his “fundamental contributions to cryptography”. Also in 2013 he was elected Member of the KNAW for his “groundbreaking applications of classical mathematics in cryptography”. He served as Program Chair for EUROCRYPT 2005, PKC 2008 and TCC 2012. Cramer is an author of the textbook Secure Multi-Party Computation and Secret Sharing (Cambridge, 2015).
More information:
homepage of Prof. R.J.F. Cramer: http://homepages.cwi.nl/~cramer/
ERC grants: https://erc.europa.eu/funding/advanced-grants
The Cryptology research group at CWI: http://www.cwi.nl/research/groups/cryptology/
