CWI cryptographer Ronald Cramer received a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant of 2.5 million euro for his proposal 'Algebraic Methods for Stronger Crypto' in March 2017. He leads the Cryptology Research group at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam and is a full professor at the Mathematical Institute of Leiden University. The grant is awarded by the European Research Council (ERC) to outstanding researchers for their pioneering research, their ideas, track records and research environment.
Ronald Cramer is best known for his fundamental contributions to cryptography, such as the Cramer-Shoup encryption, which is adopted in an international ISO standard, and for the hash proof systems building on this research. Other examples are his work on cryptographic protocol theory (such as the 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. In recent years, he also focused on the mathematics of 'quantum-safe crypto'.
Since June 2004, Ronald Cramer (1968) has been the head of the Cryptology research group at CWI, and a full professor at the Mathematical Insitute of Leiden University. His research group at CWI 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 ETH Zürich and Aarhus University. He also held visiting professorships at UPC (Barcelona, 2003), CRM (Barcelona, 2005), ENS (Rue d'Ulm, Paris, 2006), Complutense (Madrid, 2007) and NTU (Singapore, ongoing since 2008). In 2003 he was a Visiting Distinguished Scientist at NTT Research Labs (Tokyo).
In 1998 Cramer received the (first) Christiaan Huygens Prijs from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) for his PhD thesis of 1996. He was awarded a Vici grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) in 2006. From 2006-2010 he was a member of the inaugural class of the Young Academy of the KNAW. In 2011 he was an Invited Speaker at the 30th EUROCRYPT conference. In 2013, Cramer was appointed Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) for his “fundamental contributions to cryptography”. Also in 2013 he was appointed Member of the KNAW for his “groundbreaking applications of classical mathematics in cryptography”. He is an author of the recent textbook Secure Multi-Party Computation and Secret Sharing (Cambridge, 2015).
More information:
homepage of Prof. R.J.F. Cramer: http://homepages.cwi.nl/~cramer/
ERC grants: https://erc.europa.eu/funding/advanced-grants
