Professor, Institute of Computer Science, Universityof Tartu, Estonia
Head of Chair of Security and Theoretical Computer Science
Leader of the Cryptography research group
I have been an active cryptography researcher since around 1997. My first research topic was time-stamping --- combined with authenticated data structures and accumulators. I have researched many cryptographic topics, starting from differential cryptanalysis and ending with MPC. However, since 2001, I have been active in zero-knowledge research. I wrote my first SNARK paper in 2008, where we showed that one can achieve (inefficient) SNARKs under knowledge assumptions. My 2003 paper on using Diophantine equations and groups of unknown order and my 2012 paper on trustless accumulators inspired well-known SNARKs like DARK. My 2012 paper on SNARKs was the last "theoretical" step before GGPR13 and Pinocchio made SNARKs practical. In 2017, I got the best (or best-3) paper award in Asiacrypt for our paper that defined and constructed subversion-resistant SNARKs. In 2022, I had one paper where I generalized Groth16-like SNARKs to many settings and another paper where we proposed the most communication-efficient known updatable SNARK Vampire. In 2023, we proposed AGM, a more realistic version of AGM. In 2024, we showed that one can prove KZG-based zk-SNARKs are knowledge-sound in the random oracle model without relying on non-falsifiable assumptions. In 2024, I also proposed Polymath, which has a shorter argument size than the famous Groth16 zk-SNARK.
See the news section in the research group page.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs (Autumn 2024)
Cryptographic Protocols (Autumn 2018)
Erki Külaots (MSc 2024)
Sven Laur (Ph.D. 2008, now an associate professor at the University of Tartu) - google scholar
Bingsheng Zhang (Ph.D. 2012, now a professor at the Zhejiang University) - google scholar
Prastudy Fauzi (Ph.D. 2017, now a research fellow at the Nanjiang Technical University) - google scholar
Rafik Chaabouni (Ph.D. 2017, now a cyber security architect at the Swiss Armed Forces) - google scholar
Janno Siim (Ph.D. 2020, now an assistant professor at the University of Tartu) - google scholar
Karim Baghery (Ph.D. 2020, now a postdoc at the KU Leuven) - google scholar
Behzad Abdolmaleki (Ph.D. 2020, now an assistant professor at the University of Sheffield) - google scholar
Arne-Tobias Ødegaard (Ph.D. 2022, now a postdoc at the NSM) - google scholar
Roberto Parisella (Ph.D. 2023, now a postdoc at the Simula UiB) - google scholar
(People who had a different supervisor but who spent a considerable amount of time in my research group as a Ph.D. student)
Michal Zajac (now a head of cryptography research at Nethermind) - google scholar
Toomas Krips (now an assistant professor at University of Tartu) - google scholar
Institute of Computer Science
Narva mnt 18
51009 Tartu
Estonia