Levchin Prize for D-INFK researchers
Professor David Basin and lecturer Ralf Sasse from the Department of Computer Science, together with Professors Cas Cremers and Jannik Dreier, have been honored with the Levchin Prize at the Real World Cryptography Conference. They received the award for developing Tamarin, a leading system for the formal verification of cryptographic protocols.
The Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography recognises major innovations in cryptography that have had a significant impact on its practical use in real-world systems. Established in 2016 through a donation by Max Levchin, an American entrepreneur and computer scientist, the prize is presented annually at the Real World Cryptography Conference, with two awards given each year.
The recipients of one of this year’s awards are Professor David Basin, lecturer Ralf Sasse, former postdoc Cas Cremers, now Professor at CISPA, and former postdoc Jannik Dreier, now Associate Professor at the University of Lorraine, from the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. They are recognised for their work on the Tamarin Prover, which grew out of research that began around 2009 within David Basin’s Information Security Group and later developed into the system honoured today. Substantial contributions to Tamarin were also made by the doctoral students Simon Meier and Benedikt Schmidt, who played an important role in the initial phase of the project.
Tamarin is an open-source tool for the formal, symbolic analysis of security protocols. It supports both the identification of potential attacks and the construction of formal proofs, and has been used to model and analyse real-world protocols such as 5G, TLS, EMV, iMessage PQ3 and other industrial standards.
Professor David Basin has been a Full Professor at ETH Zurich since 2003, conducting research within the Institute of Information Security at D-INFK. He holds a PhD from Cornell University and worked at the University of Edinburgh, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and the University of Freiburg before joining ETH Zurich. Professor Basin’s research focuses on methods and tools for building secure and reliable information systems. He is Editor-in-Chief of Springer-Verlag’s book series on Information Security and Cryptography and, from 2015 to 2020, of ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security. He was also the founding director of the Zurich Information Security Center (ZISC) and is a Fellow of both the ACM and IEEE.
Dr Ralf Sasse is a lecturer and Senior Scientist (Focus Education) at the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. His research focuses on the intersection of information security and formal methods, specifically automated analysis of security protocols and the development of supporting tools. Ralf Sasse completed his PhD in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studying formal methods under José Meseguer, and previously worked on the KeY Project, a long-term research initiative developing tools for formal software specification and verification, at the University of Karlsruhe. Before joining ETH Zurich as a lecturer, he was a postdoc and senior researcher in Professor Basin’s Information Security Group.
Professor Cas Cremers is currently a faculty member at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. He earned his PhD from the Technical University of Eindhoven in 2006. From 2006 to 2013, he was a postdoc, senior researcher and lecturer in David Basin’s group at ETH Zurich. Following this, he became an Associate Professor at the University of Oxford and was appointed Professor of Information Security there in 2015. Cas Cremers joined CISPA in 2018. His research focuses on information security, cryptographic protocol analysis and the development of formal verification tools with both theoretical and practical impact.
Professor Jannik Dreier is an Associate Professor at the University of Lorraine, teaching at TELECOM Nancy and conducting research in the PESTO team at LORIA, the Lorraine Research Laboratory in Computer Science and its Applications. He was previously a postdoc in David Basin’s group at ETH Zurich. Jannik Dreier works on protocol security, formal verification of security protocols, theoretical foundations such as process algebra and rewriting and privacy-preserving computations. He also co-chairs the CNRS Working Group on Formal Methods for Security and serves as head of the Department of Formal Methods at LORIA.
The Levchin Prize recognises the technical achievements of this team and the tangible impact of Tamarin on securing real-world cryptographic systems.
More information
- David Basin’s website
- Ralf Sasse’s website
- external page Cas Cremer’s website
- external page Jannik Dreier’s website
- external page Simon Meier’s website
- external page Benedikt Schmidt’s website
- external page Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography
- external page Tamarin Prover
- Information Security Group
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