Chair
The Chair of Applied Cryptography (ChaAC) was founded in September 2016 under supervision of Prof. Dr. Dominique Schröder at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). ChaAC is part of the Nuremberg Campus of Technology (NCT). The overarching object of ChaAC is the development and analysis of cryptographic techniques, schemes and protocols that help to address a variety of IT security and privacy problems.
Research conducted at ChaAC encompasses foundational research questions such as, the investigation of the minimal cryptographic assumptions to address certain IT security or privacy problems, among many others. The answers to these questions help to shape the understanding of the different cryptographic schemes and techniques, whereby we learn that some tasks can be realized while others cannot.
The applied research group focuses on the development and analysis of cryptographic methods to improve the security and privacy in practical applications. This includes, to name a few, the development of password hardening mechanisms, encryption of structure data, cryptographic currencies, analysis of cryptographic scheme used in practice, etc.
The office of the chair is located at the former industrial sites of AEG in Nuremberg. Currently, the chair has about 10 employees belonging to five different nationalities with an interdisciplinary background in mathematics, computer science, and bio-informatics. ChaAC is a research-oriented group where the members enjoy the collaboration with their (inter)national partners from research, industry, and the public sector.
A leading project of the chair is the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Center 1223 on “Methods and Tools for Understanding and Controlling Privacy” (privacySFB). The research questions addressed by the collaborative research center can be broadly classified into those relevant to understanding privacy, those relevant to controlling privacy, and the overarching ones relevant to both.
Another leading project is the BMBF-funded research project PROMISE – PeRsOnal MedIcal SafE. The goal of PROMISE is to give the control of the medical data in the hand of the patient. The patient decides when, how and which person can access these data. The access will not be granted to the raw data, but only to the encrypted version. This means that the person who wishes to perform computations on the encrypted data learns only the answer.
Furthermore, the chair cooperates closely with the members of crypto network Cryptography for Secure Interaction funded by the European Union COST – European Cooperation in Science and Technology ICT COST Action IC1306.
ChaAC is also involved in teaching activities for support of the Department of Computer Science in the following disciplines:
- Introduction to Cryptography
- Secure Multi-Party Computation
- Cryptocurrencies
- Foundations of Cryptocurrencies
ChaAC follows the Rules of Good Scientific Practice (PDF), as described for example by the German Research Foundation (DFG).