Paul Gerhart
Paul Gerhart Artilleriestr. 14 91052 Erlangen +49 1517 0633852 info [at] paul-gerhart.de
About Me

My name is Paul Gerhart and I am a researcher and assessor. My main field is cryptography where I study fair exchange, optimized blockchain protocols and differential privacy.

Cryptography

Cryptography is my passion as it combines the two fields I like most: mathematics and computer science. While mathematics has a long scientific background, cryptography was more of an art most of the time. This changed when Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman turned this ancient art into science in 1976. Since then, we assume a cryptographic scheme is secure if the ability to break it can be used to solve a problem that we assume to be hard. While the power and elegance of modern cryptographic tools seem like magic because they are too strong to be possibly true, it is fascinating how we can realize them using just the beauty of assumptions and logical conclusions. Some keywords here are zero-knowledge proofs and commitment schemes. It is even more fascinating when your desired career was to be a magician as a child like it was for me.

Privacy

The emerging complexity of modern world applications often neglects the users’ privacy. My goal is to enable research on potentially sensitive data using cryptographic schemes such that the full functionality of the application can be achieved while securing every single user’s privacy. An impressive cryptographic construction that achieves this goal is Differential Privacy.

Education
Dr-Ing. in Cryptography Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg 08/2022 - now
Master of Science in Computer Science Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg Cryptography, Privacy, Cyber Security and IT-Forensics 10/2020 - 07/2022
Bachelor of Science in Mathematics University of Bonn Algebraic Topology 10/2017 - 09/2020
Work
Assessor Cryptography, Privacy, IT-Forensics 12/2022 - now
Scientific Employee Applied Cryptography Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg
08/2022 - now
Student Employee Software Development Richard Wenzel GmbH & Co.KG
10/2017 - 07/2022
Recent Publications
Practical Schnorr Threshold Signatures without the Algebraic Group Model Hien Chu, Paul Gerhart, Tim Ruffing, Dominique Schröder CRYPTO 2023
A General Approach to Adaptor Signatures supervised by Dominique Schröder, Sri AravindaKrishnan Thyagarajan, and Pratik Soni Master Thesis
Surgery and a Theorem of Lickorish supervised by Wolfgang Lück and Christoph Winges Bachelor Thesis

Complete List
Recent Talks
How to Avoid Unfair Exchange: Adaptor Security Revisited IEEE S&P 2023, San Francisco, CA
Practical Schnorr Threshold Signatures without the Algebraic Group Model CIBE 2023, Bertinoro, Italy

Complete List
Teaching
Lectures
Introduction to Modern Cryptography Winter term 22/23 Teaching assistant
Supervised Students
Julian Kotzur, Master Thesis 2023 Signature Security Revisited: One Dice to Rule Them All
Community Service
External Reviews
European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS) 2022, 2023
Advances in Cryptology (ASIACRYPT) 2022
IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF) 2023
Eurocrypt 2023
Public Key Cryptography (PKC) 2023
Advances in Cryptology (CRYPTO) 2023