EUROCRYPT 2016

I am writing this post on the plane, while coming back to Paris from Vienna, where I attended EUROCRYPT with a nice group of colleagues from ENS Paris. It was my first conference and really a magnificent experience: I am really glad I had the opportunity to spend some days attending interesting crypto talks, meeting new people, discussing possible new ideas and visiting such a beautiful city.

As I said, we had the opportunity to listen to many interesting talks, some of which were given by PhD students. In particular I would like to cite three talks, which were given by my labmates Romain Gay, Pierrick Méaux and Adrian Thillard. Pierrick talked about stream ciphers for FHE and how to get fully homomorphic encryption closer to practical efficiency (link). Adrian presented a joint work with other labmates of ours about randomness complexity and the d-probing model (link). And last, Romain presented a joint work with Hoeteck Wee (that I am privileged to have as one of my supervisors),  Dennis Hofheinz and Eike Kiltz about "tightly CCA-secure encryption without pairings" (link) which won the best paper award! The awarding ceremony took place during the cocktail organized for the participants at Vienna's town hall, where we were hosted by the mayor in the impressive Feestsaal of the Rathaus palace.

It was also a particularly special conference for me and my colleagues Florian and Rafael because it came just after being notified that the paper we wrote together with (and under the supervision of) Hoeteck has been accepted to CRYPTO 2016. The paper is about a new technique to achieve circuit privacy for fully homomorphic encryption and it is available here.
The satisfaction of publishing a paper (which for me is the first) is something really amazing and it surely rewards all of us for all the work we put in writing it! As icing on the cake, my advisor suggested that I should give a mini-talk at EUROCRYPT's rump session: even if it was short and given during an informal event such as a rump session, I really enjoyed myself. I would also like to thank all my labmates that were sitting in the first rows of the hall to cheer and clap! :)

Another really enjoyable moment was the official dinner, that was organized at Weingut Fuhrgassl-Huber, just outside of the city, where we had delicious pork meat, fried vegetables, wine and desserts, plus music and the opportunity to get together and meet new people.

In the end I would like to congratulate and sincerely thank all the organizers, the program chairs, the session chairs, and everyone who made EUROCRYPT 2016 possible and so nice. Great job!
Next year, EUROCRYPT will be in Paris and I am already looking forward to it. Safe travel home to everyone and see you soon!


And here is a nice picture of a part of the ENS team enjoying a delicious pizza at an Italian restaurant.

On the left: Michele Minelli, Geoffroy Couteau, Florian Bourse, Aurelien Dupin, Romain Gay, Pierrick Meaux

On the right: Jeremy Chotard, Pierre-Alain Dupont, Remi Geraud, Dahmun Goudarzi, Rafael Del Pino, Adrian Thillard