Dominique Schröder Joins CySec

Dominique Schröder is joining the TUW as a new professor and will head the Privacy Enhancing Technologies research group as of September.

Previously, he held the position of Full Professor of Applied Cryptography at Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen-Nürnberg. Before that, he was a tenured professor at Saarland University. Dominique completed his postdoctoral research at the University of Maryland, USA, under the guidance of Jonathan Katz. He earned his Ph.D. at the Technical University of Darmstadt, supervised by Marc Fischlin, and received his Diploma (equivalent to a Master’s degree) from the Technical University of Braunschweig.

Dominique Schröder is deeply engaged in the field of cryptography, focusing on the development of privacy-preserving technologies that enhance security and privacy in practical applications. His research centers on integrating modern cryptographic methods, such as homomorphic cryptography and secure multiparty computation, with differential privacy techniques to maintain functionality in new applications without compromising individual privacy. Schröder is particularly interested in practical, decentralized cryptographic systems that do not depend on trusted parties. This interest extends to privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies and improving the efficiency of distributed systems.

Schröder’s work also involves exploring advanced cryptographic primitives that boost privacy, including advanced signature schemes and functional commitments. He contributes significantly to the development and understanding of these primitives, adapting them for practical use while considering the reality of cryptographic systems that often rely on less-than-ideal conditions, such as low entropy sources or weak randomness.

His research not only tests the boundaries of cryptographic theory and practice, using weak sources of secrets and randomness but also investigates the reliance of many practical cryptographic schemes on idealized models like the random oracle model. This approach helps bridge the gap between theoretical security and real-world applications, providing insights into both the challenges of realizing cryptographic tasks and the reliability of schemes used in practice.

Check out the interview with Dominique Schröder in the #5QW series.