OPTIMIST Workshop '25

Benedikt Gierlichs is a research expert in the COSIC (Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography) research group at KU Leuven in Belgium. He works with the embedded security group and leads the attacks and evaluations team. His research focuses on the (physical) security of embedded devices. He has co-authored more than 60 scientific publications in peer-reviewed, international conferences and journals. He has served on many program committees of international conferences and has co-chaired 4 of them. He is a member of the IACR, a Belgian delegate to the ISO/IEC SC27 standardization group and chairman of the CHES steering committee. Dr. Gierlichs manages part of COSIC’s collaboration with industry.

Matthias Kannwischer is the research director at the Taipei-based quantum-safe cryptography startup Chelpis Quantum Corp. His group works on high-speed & high-assurance implementations of cryptography with a focus on quantum-safe constructions. Matthias has authored over 20 publications on quantum-safe cryptography implementations. In 2022, he obtained a PhD in post-quantum cryptography implementations from Radboud University, The Netherlands where he was supervised by Peter Schwabe. Prior to joining Chelpis, Matthias was a postdoctoral researcher at Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, Germany. Matthias contributes to open-source cryptographic software and is currently a maintainer of mlkem-native, mldsa-native, PQClean, and pqm4. He is also part of the design teams of the two promising quantum-safe signature schemes UOV and MAYO that have been shortlisted by NIST as promising round-2 candidates.

Michael Hutter is a professor for Embedded Systems Security at the Research Institute CODE, University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Germany. He has over 20 years of experience in secure hardware design and held several positions in industry at Rambus Cryptography Research Division/CRI (California, USA) and PQShield (Oxford, UK). He received a Venia Docendi (Habilitation) in 2016 and a PhD in Hardware Security in 2014 from Graz University of Technology, Austria. His research interests include secure and efficient cryptographic implementations, with an emphasis on embedded hardware security.

Francisco Rodríguez-Henríquez

Peter Schwabe is scientific director at MPI-SP and professor at Radboud University. He graduated from RWTH Aachen University in computer science in 2006 and received a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of Eindhoven University of Technology in 2011. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Information Science and the Research Center for Information Technology Innovation of Academia Sinica, Taiwan and at National Taiwan University. His research area is cryptographic engineering; in particular the security and performance of cryptographic software. He published more than 80 articles in journals and at international conferences presenting, for example, fast software for a variety of cryptographic primitives including AES, hash functions, elliptic-curve cryptography, and cryptographic pairings. He has also published articles on fast cryptanalysis, in particular attacks on the discrete-logarithm problem. In recent years he has focused in particular on post-quantum cryptography. He co-authored the "NewHope" and "NTRU-HRSS" lattice-based key-encapsulation schemes which were used in post-quantum TLS experiments by Google and he is co-submitter of seven proposals to the NIST post-quantum crypto project, all of which made it to the second round, five of which made it to the third round, and 3 of which were selected after round 3 for standardization. In 2021, he co-founded the Formosa-Crypto project, an effort by multiple research groups to build (post-quantum) cryptographic software with formal proofs of functional correctness and security.

Marc Witteman leads the Device Security team at Keysight. He has three decades of experience in device security on both hardware and software topics. While originally focusing on secure chips for banking cards, his interest over time shifted to all edge devices that need to be secure. These include cell phones, smart TVs, and cars. He was one of the first to research side channel problems and developed the leading tools in the market for testing side channel leakage and fault robustness.