Ronald Cramer from Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam and Leiden University has been appointed Fellow of IACR. This was announced on 8 April by the International Association for Cryptologic Research, IACR. The selection committee praised the mathematician for his contributions to the development of modern cryptography. He received the title "for fundamental contributions to cryptography, for sustained educational leadership in cryptography, and for service to the IACR". Cramer is the first researcher active in the Netherlands to receive this prestigious award. The ceremony takes place during the 33rd CRYPTO conference in August 2013 in Santa Barbara, Ca., USA.
From 2004, Ronald Cramer is head of the Cryptology research group at CWI. This group investigates fundamental cryptographic questions from a broad scientific perspective, particularly from mathematics, computer science and physics. Before Cramer started at CWI, he held positions at Aarhus University and ETH Zürich. From 1992 to 1996 he was also affiliated with CWI. Together with his American colleague Victor Shoup, he drew worldwide attention in 1998 with an article on cryptosystems resistant to active attacks. In 1998 Cramer received the Christiaan Huygens Prijs from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and he was a member of the inaugural class of the Young Academy of the KNAW from 2005-2010. He was appointed full professor at Leiden University in 2004. In 2006 he was awarded a Vici grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and in 2011 he was Invited Speaker at the 30th EUROCRYPT conference.
Cramer is, amongst others, known for the Cramer-Shoup encryption – which is adopted by an international ISO standard – and for the hash proof systems building on this research. Other examples comprise work on cryptographic protocol theory (such as 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. "For the security of future computer systems it is necessary to invest in fundamental cryptography now", the researcher says. "I am very pleased with this appreciation from IACR."
More information:
http://www.iacr.org/fellows/2013/cramer.html
homepage of Prof. R.J.F. Cramer: http://homepages.cwi.nl/~cramer/
