Christof Paar

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Christof Paar (* July 18, 1963, in Cologne) is a German cryptograph. He is one of the funding directors at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy in Bochum, a "Scientific Member" of the Max Planck Society, IEEE Fellow, and a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

Life and career

After training as a telecommunications mechanic, Christof Paar studied communications engineering at the Technical University of Cologne (then FH Köln) from 1984 to 1988. After his civilian service, he studied electrical engineering with a specialization in technical data processing at the University of Siegen from 1989 to 1991. He wrote his diploma thesis at Michigan Technological University on active sound field compensation. From 1991 to 1994, he was a doctoral student with Han Vinck at the Institute for Experimental Mathematics at the University of Duisburg-Essen (then the University of Essen). His dissertation was on computer architectures for arithmetic in finite fields. From 1995 to 2001, he was an Assistant and later Associate Professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts for nearly seven years. From 2001 to 2019, he held the Chair of Embedded Security at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. From 2008 to 2009 and from 2014 to 2016, he worked as a Research Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Since 2019, he is one of the two founding directors of the new Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy in Bochum.

Paar's research deals with the engineering aspects of cryptography. He has significantly contributed to efficiently implementing symmetric and asymmetric crypto algorithms, side-channel analysis, embedded systems security, and hardware security. In 1999, he founded CHES (Conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems) at WPI, which has become one of the most important international conferences on cryptography. Moreover, he established the Horst Görtz Institute for Information Security together with Hans Dobbertin at the Ruhr University Bochum, hosting Bochum's bachelor's and master's degree programs in the field of IT security. From 2019 he is the spokesperson for the Cluster of Excellence "Cyber Security in the Age of Large-Scale Attackers" with Eike Kiltz and Angela Sasse. In 2003, Paar founded Escrypt GmbH together with Willi Mannheims, one of the first companies to focus on industrial data security. Since 2012, Escrypt has been part of Robert Bosch GmbH.

Awards and honors

• 1998 NSF CAREER Award
• 2010 German IT Security Award (with Gregor Leander and Axel Poschmann) of the Horst Görtz Foundation for the crypto method Present
• 2011 IEEE Fellow
• 2012 Innovation Award NRW
• 2013 DHL Innovation Award (mit Gregor Leander und Axel Poschmann)
• 2016 ERC Advanced Grant EPoCH
• 2017 IACR Fellow (International Association for Cryptologic Research)
• 2019 Admission as a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
• 2021 Ring of honor of the city of Bochum

Scientific work

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

Web links

• Member Entry of Christof Paar at the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
• EMSEC – Embedded Security Group.
• Lecture Recordings of "Introduction to Cryptography"

References

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