Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship
The Erwin Schrödinger program is designed to support highly qualified early-stage postdoctoral researchers from all disciplines by offering them the chance to advance their careers through stays at top international research institutions. The program not only facilitates these career-enhancing opportunities but also supports the participants upon their return to Austria. Its primary goals are to foster independent research projects, enhance international experience, and introduce new research methods and approaches. Ultimately, the program aims to enrich the Austrian research landscape through significant knowledge transfer and to bolster the global experience of its researchers.
Erkan Tairi completed his Ph.D. in 2024 at the Security & Privacy Research Unit of TU Wien under the supervision of Matteo Maffei and Daniel Slamanig. His thesis, “Foundations of Adaptor Signatures for Distributed Ledger Protocols,” explores cryptographic protocols to boost scalability and interoperability across cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, focusing on payment channels and atomic swaps using adaptor signatures. Despite their reliance on proven cryptographic principles, these protocols are not secure against quantum threats and lack modular security analysis. Erkan’s research introduces a post-quantum adaptor signature scheme, establishes its security in a quantum setting, and integrates it into a modular framework for enhanced security. He also developed LedgerLocks, a system for creating secure blockchain applications, demonstrating its effectiveness in securing payment channels and privacy-preserving hubs.
Erkan has been awarded the Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship by the FWF and will pursue postdoctoral research, focusing on advanced public-key encryption using lattice-based cryptography for cloud computing and other areas vulnerable to quantum computing. His project aims to develop encryption schemes that support privacy-preserving computations and provide fine-grained data access, enhancing post-quantum security. He will explore new lattice-based functional encryption schemes and evaluate the limits of current assumptions and techniques, creating new models to address these challenges. The project includes two years at UC Berkeley hosted by Prof. Sanjam Garg and a subsequent year at IST Austria with Prof. Krzysztof Pietrzak.