Doctorat Honoris Causa ULB – Philip Zimmermann
In 2016, the Faculty of Sciences and the Ecole polytechnique jointly awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa to Mr. Philip Zimmermann.
Phil Zimmermann is the creator of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), the most widely used encryption software in the world, and is one of the best-known security analyst around. Phil is based in Geneva, where he heads the company Silent Circle – the secure communications company he co-founded in 2012.
In May 18th, 2016 Phil has been traveling to Brussels to be granted the title of Doctor Honoris Causa of our University. On this special occasion, he delivered a talk about his views and insights on encryption, privacy, and avoiding a surveillance state.
Phil Zimmermann’s pioneering work in cryptography has won him numerous technical and humanitarian accolades. In 2008, for example, PC World named him one of the “top 50 tech visionaries” of the last 50 years. In 2012, the Internet Society inducted him into its Internet Hall of Fame. And in 2014, he was inducted into the Cyber Security Hall of Fame and was named by Foreign Policy Magazine as one of that year’s leading global thinkers. His work on the groundbreaking Blackphone led to Silent Circle being named one of the “Most Innovative Companies of 2014
The NIST has selected Keccak as the winner of the new SHA-3 hash algorithm
Gilles Van Assche, a former PhD student at QuIC, is member of the team of four cryptographers who designed the Keccak algorithm, selected as the winner of the SHA-3 Cryptographic Hash Algorithm Competition by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In the review process, the cryptographic community provided an enormous amount of expert feedback and NIST winnowed the original 64 candidates down to the five finalist candidates. These finalists were further reviewed in a third public conference in March 2012, and NIST finally announced Keccak as the winner of this competition on October 2nd, 2012. Keccak will now become NIST’s new SHA-3 hash algorithm. See the press release.
Best Paper Awards
AsiaCrypt 2020
SQISign: Compact Post-Quantum signatures from Quaternions and Isogenies
Luca De Feo; David Kohel; Antonin Leroux; Christophe Petit; Benjamin Wesolowski
AsiaCrypt 2017
SHealS and HealS: isogeny-based PKEs from a key validation method for SIDH
Boris Fouotsa and Christophe Petit