Christiane Peters

Activities

Post-Quantum Cryptography at Google

date: 2022.07.11

I got a friendly acknowledgement in a Google Blog post for my contribution to the NIST competition as part of the Classic McEliece team.

How Google is preparing for a post-quantum world



Conferences

date: 2021.08.15

I actively contributed to the organization and / or program committees [PCs] of the following events:



Cloud Security Alliance - Key Management in Cloud Services

date: 2020.11.10

I actively contributed to the architecture patterns in the Key Management in Cloud Services Guidance document published by the Cloud Security Alliance Key Management Working group.



Classic McEliece - NIST PQC Round 3 Finalist

date: 2020.07.23

NIST announced yesterday that Classic McEliece is one of the Round-3 Finalists in the Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process.

“As such, NIST selected Classic McEliece as a finalist and believes it could be ready for standardization (should NIST choose to select it) at the end of the third round.”

The full report by NIST can be found here.

The Classic McEliece submission in Round 3 is a merger of the Classic McEliece and NTS-KEM submissions to the previous rounds. The submission builds on code-based cryptography with binary Goppa codes, a proposal that has not been broken for more than 40 years.



Blog post on Cryptography Services for Enterprises

date: 2019.10.21

I wrote a blog post on “How to Make Cryptography Services Work for Your Organization” which was published on the IBM Security Intelligence website. Check it out for some real-world lessons learned.



Architect Certification

date: 2019.10.16

I completed the Level 2 certification as IBM and Open Group Architect in October 2019. This certification is not a one-time sit-down learn-stuff-by-heart and forget-all-again. Instead, I earned the certification by working continuously as architect for multiple years and by demonstrating my achievements to an internal review board at IBM.

I have led several large projects as security architect. My reference projects concerned architectures for smart metering security, cryptography services for financial services, and enterprise security architectures. I followed a series of trainings on architecture, design thinking, consulting and project management. I also specialized not only in security architecture, but also learned how IT is managed for a specific industry: in my case I focused on banks. Further I earned this certification by giving presentations at international conferences and summer schools, by creating reusable assets, and last but not least by mentoring others.



NIST PQCrypto Classic McEliece submission

date: 2018.04.07

Classic McEliece Submission to NIST’s Post-Quantum Standardization together with Daniel J. Bernstein, Tung Chou, Tanja Lange, Ingo von Maurich, Rafael Misoczki, Ruben Niederhagen, Edoardo Persichetti, Peter Schwabe, Nicolas Sendrier, Jakub Szefer, and Wen Wang.

Great to see that my Ph.D. research is relevant for the next crypto standardization, i.e., the parameters in the 2008 paper Attacking and defending the McEliece cryptosystem are still holding up.

screenshot-2008-paper

Now included as the IND-CCA2 KEM parameters for mceliece6960119:

m = 13, n = 6960, t = 119, l = 256.

Moreover, more PQCrypto code-based crypto submissions also used my complexity computations to determine the security level of their proposals.



Enterprise Key and Certificate Management

date: 2018.01.09

I gave a lecture at the ECRYPT winter school in Zurich, Switzerland on how large enterprises manage cryptographic keys and public-key certificates.

ECRYPT-CSA School on Societal Aspects of Cryptology and on Business and Innovation in Crypto, 7-9 January 2018,Zurich, Switzerland.

One of the goals was to bridge the gap between industry and academia. I.e., answering the question: how long will it take to get pqcrypto research into practice in a large enterprise environment.



Blog post: GDPR Readiness

date: 2017.03.24

I published an IBM Blog post: What to expect from the GDPR readiness assessment.



Crypto Workshop Girl Tech Fest Brussels

date: 2016.05.04

Together with my IBM Belgium colleagues I organized a crypto workshop for 10-14 year old girls at the Digital Muse Girl Tech Fest in Brussels on Saturday April 30, 2016. We ran 4 workshops where the girls learned how to make and break ciphers - all toy examples of course. Still, lots of fun and great to see that girls enjoy math and crypto!

tech-fest



Dagstuhl Seminar 16032

date: 2016.01.16

Privacy and Security in Smart Energy Grids January 17‒20, 2016 Dagstuhl, Germany Scientific organization together with George Danezis, Stefan Katzenbeisser, and Bart Preneel



Best Paper ARES 2015

date: 2015.08.26

Klaus Kursawe and I won the ARES 2015 Best Paper Award for our paper Structural Weaknesses in the Open Smart Grid Protocol. eprint

best paper



FP7 project SEGRID

date: 2015.04.30

While working for ENCS I was one of the researchers on the FP7 project SeGRID (Security for Smart Electricity GRIDs ). I contributed in particular to the deliverables.

D1.1 – Architecture and design for use cases. html

D1.3 – First report on Security & privacy goals. html

Project website: https://segrid.eu/



Austria Smart Meter Security Requirements”

date: 2015.03.30

At ENCS I co-wrote the Smart Meter Requirements for Austria’s End-to-End Secure Smart Metering architecture published by Oesterreichs Energie. We wrote the original in German, then added an English translation later. The documents were made available to the public: https://oesterreichsenergie.at/sicherheitsanforderungen-fuer-smart-meter.html



Visiting MSR

date: 2013.02.05

I am visiting the Cryptography Research Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond from February 4 to April 26, 2013. Thanks to Kristin Lauter and Michael Naehrig for inviting me.



Decoding Wild Goppa Codes

date: 2012-10.12

A simple Python script to decode wild Goppa codes. The algorithm is described in detail in the article Wild McEliece.

See here: https://github.com/christianepeters/wild



Postdoc at UIC

date: 2012.10.12

Thanks to Dan Bernstein and NIST for employing me for the period of three months as research associate in the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Also a big thanks to Jon Solworth for giving me asylum in the RITES lab.



Lorentz Center Workshop

date: 2012.10.12

Post-Quantum Cryptography and Quantum Algorithms November 5‒9, 2012 Leiden, the Netherlands Scientific organizers: Tanja Lange, Michele Mosca, and Christiane Peters

Wiki page containing the program, contributed talks, working groups:

https://wiki.pqcrypto.org/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page



Code-based Cryptography Workshop May 2012

date: 2012.10.12

I organized the Code-based Cryptography Workshop in 2012: May 9-11 at the Technical University of Denmark.

http://2012.cbc.pqcrypto.org/



FTP grant

Fall 2011

On September 1, 2011 I started as a postdoc in the Math department at the Technical University of Denmark. The position is funded by a Technology and Production Sciences (FTP) grant by the Danish Council for Independent Research under grant number 11-105325; awarded 1,622,015 DKK for the purpose of conducting research on “Code-based Cryptography”.



Rubicon Award

Summer 2011

Rubicon Award 2011 by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO); awarded 163,763 Euro for the purpose of conducting research on “Code-based Cryptography”; grant money declined because in conflict with FTP grant.

Official announcements in English and Nederlands.



Code-based Cryptography Workshop May 2011

May 2011

Together with Tanja Lange I co-organized the Code-based Cryptography Workshop: May 11-12, 2011 at Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

http://www.win.tue.nl/cccc/cbc/



Dissertation

May 2011

In May 2011, I completed my Ph.D. studies at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven in the Coding and Cryptology Group under the supervision of Tanja Lange and Daniel J. Bernstein.

  • Ph.D. thesis: Curves, Codes, and Cryptography. Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. The Netherlands, 2011.   pdf bibtex statements



Iteration count for ISDFq attack

Summer 2010

My paper Information-set decoding for linear codes over Fq presents a new algorithm for decoding linear codes over arbitrary finite fields Fq.

The repository https://github.com/christianepeters/isdfq contains a PARI/GP file for a crude operation count as well as a precise iteration count on the basis of a Markov-chain computation. The implementation is written in C and uses the MPFI library. Details on how to use the implementation can be found here.



Iteration count for attack on the original McEliece parameters

Summer 2009

Iteration count of the improved variant of Stern’s algorithm for binary linear codes by Daniel J.  Bernstein, Tanja Lange, and myself published at PQCrypto 2008.

Compute the iteration counts for our attack on the McEliece cryptosystem using the type-3 Markov-chain analysis.

https://github.com/christianepeters/isdf2

The implementation is written in C and uses the MPFI library. Note that you might need to increase the level of precision if you consider codes of length greater than 1024. Change the line

int prec = 150;

to something more convenient.



Google Anita Borg Scholarship

June 2009

Awarded to twenty-one selected female Ph.D. and Master students from Europe for excellence performance in computing and technology; I got 5,000 Euro. :-)

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/announcing-2009-anita-borg-scholars-and.html

In June 2009 I went together with the other award winners to the Google Europe Anita Borg Scholarship Retreat in Zürich, Switzerland.



SHA-2 will soon retire

Summer 2009

A brief look at the 56 SHA-3 submissions. Joint “talk” by Michael Naehrig, Peter Schwabe, and myself during the rump session of Eurocrypt 2009. Cologne, Germany.   slides   lyrics and chords youtube



EECM comic

Spring 2008

EECM: using the elliptic-curve method of integer factorization with Edwards Curves.