Christof Paar

Christof Paar (born July 18, 1963 in Cologne ) is a German cryptographer and communications engineer and has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for Cybersecurity and Privacy Protection in Bochum since mid-2019 .

Live and act

After training as a telecommunications mechanic, Christof Paar studied communications engineering at the Technical University of Cologne from 1984 to 1988 , at that time Cologne University of Applied Sciences. After his community service he studied electrical engineering from 1989 to 1991 with a specialization in technical data processing at the University of Siegen . He wrote his thesis on active sound field compensation at Michigan Technological University . From 1991 to 1994 he was a doctoral student with Han Vinck in the Institute for Experimental Mathematics at the University of Duisburg-Essen (then University of Essen) and did his doctorate on computer architecture for arithmetic in finite bodies. From 1995 to 2001 he worked for almost seven years as an assistant and later an associate professor at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts . From 2001 to 2019 he held the chair for Embedded Security at the Ruhr University Bochum . Since 2019 he has been one of the two founding directors of the new Max Planck Institute for Cybersecurity and Protection of Privacy in Bochum. From 2008 to 2009 and 2014 to 2016 he worked as a research professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst .

Paar's research deals with the engineering aspects of cryptography. He has made important contributions to the efficient implementation of symmetric and asymmetric crypto-algorithms, side-channel analysis, the security of embedded systems and hardware security. In 1999 he established the CHES (Conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems) at the WPI, which has developed into one of the most important international conferences for cryptography. At the Ruhr University he set up the Horst Görtz Institute for Information Security together with Hans Dobbertin . Paar was also instrumental in setting up the Bochum Bachelor and Master degree programs in the field of IT security. Since 2019, together with Thorsten Holz and Eike Kiltz, he has been the spokesman for the Cluster of Excellence “Cyber ​​Security in the Age of Large-Scale Attackers”. In 2003, Paar founded Escrypt GmbH together with Willi Mannheims, one of the first companies to focus on industrial data security. Escrypt has been part of Robert Bosch GmbH since 2012 .

Awards and honors

• 1998 NSF CAREER Award
• 2010 German IT Security Award
• 2011 IEEE Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• 2012 NRW Innovation Prize
• 2013 DHL Innovation Award
• 2016 ERC Advanced Grant in the field of hardware security
• 2017 IACR Fellow (International Association for Cryptologic Research)
• 2019 admission as a member of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina

Fonts

• Christof Paar, Jan Pelzl: Understanding Cryptography . 1st edition. Springer Verlag, Berlin / Heidelberg 2010, ISBN 978-3-642-04101-3 .
• Christof Paar, Jan Pelzl: Cryptography understandable . 1st edition. Springer Verlag, Berlin / Heidelberg 2016, ISBN 978-3-662-49297-0 .
• PRESENT: An Ultra-Lightweight Block Cipher

Web links

• Member Post by Christof Paar at the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
• EMSEC - Chair for Embedded Security.
• Lecture notes on "Introduction to Cryptography" by Christof Paar
• Page about Paar and the Max Planck Institute at www.mpg.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Two top researchers for IT security and data protection website of the MPG. Retrieved October 16, 2019.