Prof. Dr. Kenneth Paterson

Education and professional milestones:

• B.Sc. from the external page University of Glasgow in 1990; Ph.D. from the external page University of London in 1993, both in Mathematics.
• Royal Society Fellow at the Institute for Signal and Information Processing at ETH Zurich, from 1993 to 1994.
• external page Lloyd's of London Tercentenary Foundation Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, from 1994 to 1996.
• Joined external page Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Bristol in 1996, becoming a project manager in 1999.
• Joined the Information Security Group at external page Royal Holloway, University of London in 2001, becoming a Reader in 2002 and a Professor in 2004.
• EPSRC Leadership Fellow working on a project entitled external page Cryptography: Bridging Theory and Practice from March 2010 to May 2015.
• Reverted to being a Professor of Information Security in May 2015.
• Joined the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich in April 2019. Founder and Head of the Applied Cryptography Group; Associate Department Head in 2021 and 2022; Department Head in 2023 and 2024.
• Research over the last two decades mostly in the area of Cryptography, with a strong emphasis on the analysis of deployed cryptographic systems and the development of provably secure solutions to real-world cryptographic problems.
• Co-founder of the external page Real World Cryptography series of workshops to support the development of this broad area and to strengthen the links between academia and industry.
• Co-chair of the IRTF's research group on Cryptography, external page CFRG from 2014 to 2019. This group is working to provide expert advice to the IETF in an effort to strengthen the Internet's core security protocols.
• Research on the security of TLS (the external page Lucky 13 attack on CBC-mode encryption in TLS and external page attacks on RC4) received significant media attention, helped to drive the widespread adoption of TLS 1.2 with its support for modern encryption schemes, and was an important factor in the TLS Working Group's decision to abandon legacy encryption mechanisms in TLS 1.3.

A selection of research prizes and awards:

• external page Google Distinguished Paper Award for joint work with Nadhem AlFardan presenting external page plaintext recovery attacks against DTLS published at NDSS 2012.
• external page Applied Networking Research Prize from the IRTF for work with Nadhem AlFardan on the external page Lucky 13 attack.
• external page Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologiesfor work with Mihir Bellare and Phil Rogaway on the external page Security of symmetric encryption against mass surveillance published at CRYPTO 2014.
• Work with Martin Albrecht, Jean Paul Degabriele and Torben Hansen on external page symmetric encryption in SSH won a best paper award at ACM CCS 2016.
• Best paper awards at external page CHES and external page IMC in 2018.
• Work analysing the external page Telegram secure messaging system won an IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Distinguished Paper Award in 2022.
• Joint work with Francesca Falzon, a former visitor of the Applied Crypto group and PhD student at the University of Chicago won a external page best student paper award at ESORICS 2022.
  
• Research on the external page security of OpenPGP won a distinguished paper award at ACM CCS 2022.
• external page A distinguished paper award at the 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy for work with Matilda Backendal and Miro Haller.

Other career highlights:

• Programme Chair for external page EUROCRYPT 2011.
• Invited speaker at external page ASIACRYPT 2014 and external page EUROCRYPT 2024.
  
• Editor-in-chief of the external page Journal of Cryptology from 2017 to 2020.
• Made a external page fellow of the IACR in 2017.
• Winner of the ETH Golden Owl best teaching award for the Department of Computer Science in 2022.
• IACR Distinguished Lecture at external page EUROCRYPT 2025.

Recent publications: