Kenneth Paterson

ETH Zurich

Cryptography in the Wild

Wednesday, February 11th 2026, 4pm in Kleiner Hörsaal Bauningenieure, building 10.50

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.

CV: Kenny Paterson has been a Professor in the Computer Science department at ETH Zurich since 2019, where he leads the Applied Cryptography research group. Prior to that he was at Royal Holloway, University of London (2001-2019) and Hewlett-Packard Laboratories (1996-2001). He also did postdocs at ETH Zurich (1993-1994) and Royal Holloway (1994-1996). He gained his PhD in the area of Discrete Mathematics from the University of London (1990-1993) and his Bachelors degree in Mathematics from the University of Glasgow (1986-1990). Kenny was made a Fellow of the IACR (2017) "for research and service contributions spanning theory and practice, and improving the security of widely deployed protocols." He was program chair of Eurocrypt 2011, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cryptology (2017-2020), and an invited speaker at Asiacrypt 2014 and Eurocrypt 2024. He had the honour of giving the IACR Distinguished Lecture in 2025. He is co-founder of the Real World Cryptography symposium. Kenny's current research interests include the analysis of deployed Cryptography (aka ``Cryptography in the Wild''), and the development of new cryptographic tools that are fashioned with practical applications in mind.