Cryptography in the Wild: Analysing Secure Messengers

Come and hear from Professor Kenny Paterson (Computer Science, ETH Zurich, Switzerland) about his many fruitful years studying "cryptography in the wild". In particular, he will talk about secure messenger apps to provide concrete examples and help focus the discussion.

ABSTRACT

Studying "cryptography in the wild" means finding examples of cryptography being used in standards, products or deployed systems, then analysing them by either finding vulnerabilities and reporting them or by building security models and proofs for the cryptographic cores of these systems. The end result of this kind of analysis is that users gain greater assurance about the security of the systems on which they rely. In this talk I’ll reflect on the methodology by which we conduct this kind of work, what it tells us about how developers see cryptography, and what we can learn from it as a community of researchers and educators. I'll use the topic of secure messengers to provide concrete examples and help focus the discussion.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Professor Kenny Paterson (Computer Science, ETH Zurich, Switzerland) leads the Applied Cryptography Group ( https://appliedcrypto.ethz.ch/). Prior to joining ETH Zurich, he was a professor with the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London. Kenny was made a Fellow of the IACR in 2017 for “research and service contributions spanning theory and practice, and improving the security of widely deployed protocols”. He co-discovered the Lucky 13 attack. He gave the IACR Distinguished Lecture in 2025. His research has won several awards, including an Applied Networking Research Prize from the Internet Research Task Force (2014), a PET award for outstanding research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (2015), and best paper awards at NDSS 2012, ACM CCS (2016 & 2022), IEEE S&P (2022 & 2023), CHES 2018 and IMC 2018. He is co-founder of the “Real World Cryptography” series of workshops, which provide a forum for industry and academia to come together to exchange ideas in the field.

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