USI - Email

Archive / INF Seminars / INF_2025_06_11_MatildaBackendal

USI - Email

	Thriving in Between Theory and Practice - Applied Cryptography

Host: Prof. Marc Langheinrich

Wednesday

11.06

USI Campus EST, Room C1.03

10:30 - 11:15


	Matilda Backendal ETH Zurich

Abstract: Cryptography serves a crucial role in securing infrastructure and protecting privacy in our increasingly digital society. The objective of applied cryptography is to design, analyze, and deploy practical cryptographic systems that provide these guarantees. Unfortunately, this is a challenging task. Cryptography is highly brittle and small design or implementation mistakes can have devastating effects on a system level. Even selecting appropriate cryptographic building blocks and securely combining them is difficult if the threat model is unclear. In this talk, we discuss how theory can aid in overcoming some of these challenges. In particular, we draw on our experiences from recent work on analyzing and constructing cryptography for practice and illustrate why a solid theoretical foundation is crucial for practical security, and what the process for building this foundation looks like.

Biography: Matilda Backendal is a final-year PhD student in the Applied Cryptography group at ETH Zurich, supervised by Kenny Paterson. She works on provable security of cryptographic primitives and protocols, and is broadly interested in developing and analyzing cryptography in practice. Her most recent work has focused on formal definitions for key combiners and outsourced persistent data, the latter of which has laid the foundations for practical end-to-end secure cloud storage systems.