Paul Gerhart

I am a PhD student at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies research unit at TU Wien in Austria, under the supervision of Dominique Schröder.

Research

I am fascinated by problems that are hard to solve and seem intractable at first glance. Achieving fairness in two-party protocols, or achieving strong security guarantees from low-entropy seeds such as passwords are examples of such challenges. While many of these problems may seem paradoxical, I am driven to solve them using the power and elegance of cryptography. In working on such problems, my work bridges both theoretical and practical aspects. My research interests include advanced digital signatures such as adaptor signatures, secure and fair multiparty computation (including distributed key generation and threshold signatures), password-based cryptography, and differential privacy.

Education

I am pursuing my PhD under the supervision of Dominique Schröder since 2022. Initially, I began my doctoral studies at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, and subsequently followed Dominique to TU Wien, Austria, in 2024. Prior to my PhD, I earned a Master of Science (M.Sc.) in Computer Science from Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg between 2020 and 2022. Earlier, I did my Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) in Mathematics at the University of Bonn, Germany, from 2017 to 2020.

Recent Publications

A Fully-Adaptive Threshold Partially-Oblivious PRF
Ruben Baecker, Paul Gerhart, Daniel Rausch, and Dominique Schröder
CRYPTO 2025

SoK: Descriptive Statistics Under Local Differential Privacy
René Raab, Pascal Berrang, Paul Gerhart, and Dominique Schröder
PoPETS 2025

Measuring Conditional Anonymity - A Global Study
Pascal Berrang, Paul Gerhart, and Dominique Schröder
PoPETS 2024

Foundations of Adaptor Signatures
Paul Gerhart, Dominique Schröder, Pratik Soni, and Sri AravindaKrishnan Thyagarajan
EUROCRYPT 2024

Preprints

Fair Exchange for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations via Threshold Adaptor Signatures
Ruben Baecker, Paul Gerhart, Jonathan Katz, and Dominique Schröder