CyLab Seminar: Christof Paar

July 22, 2025

12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. ET

CIC 4105 Panther Hollow

Christof Paar

*Please note: this CyLab seminar is open only to partners and Carnegie Mellon University faculty, students, and staff.

Speaker:
Christof Paar
Co-Founding Director, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy
Research Professor, UMass Amherst

Talk Title: Gradient Dissent: Cybersecurity Beyond Software and Hardware

Abstract:

Classical physical-layer security (PLS) has been studied for nearly half a century. In the past, the main objective had been to realize information-theoretically secure communication. Yet, those schemes haven’t gained much practical relevance. We argue that it is more promising to apply PLS to problems for which there is no solution using digital-only schemes. In this talk we will look at a pretty wild application for such a PLS solution.

A vexing problem in nuclear disarmament agreements is the secure remote monitoring of nuclear warheads in storage. In collaboration with Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, we have developed an entirely new approach. Our solution is a special instance of a virtual-proof-of-reality scheme, based on radio-frequency signals. The basic idea is to build a challenge-and-response protocol—which are widely used in cryptography, e.g., for authentication in mobile communication—based on wireless technology.

Bio:

Christof Paar is co-founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy in Bochum, Germany and is research professor at UMass Amherst. His research interests include hardware security, applied cryptography and physical-layer security. At WPI, he co-founded CHES, the Conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, and is co-spokesperson of the Cluster of Excellence “CASA – Cyber Security in the Age of Large-Scale Adversaries” (financed by DFG, the “German NSF”). He is Fellow of the IEEE and the IACR and has given invited talks at Cambridge, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Stanford and Yale.

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