Ronald Cramer

Cryptographer Ronald Cramer (CWI and Leiden University) has been awarded the ESORICS 2023 Outstanding Research Award. This was announced by the organization on Tuesday evening, 26 September. He received the award for his outstanding and continuous research contributions to the field of cryptography, recognized by the entire ESORICS community.

“I feel honored to receive this award from ESORICS, a wonderful surprise indeed.’’ — Ronald

Since 2004, Ronald Cramer has been the head (and founder) of the Cryptology Research group at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, a world-leading group in this field. Since 2004 he is also a full professor at the Mathematical Institute at Leiden University. Prior to that (1997–2004) he held research positions at ETZ Zurich and at Aaarhus University. He is known for his fundamental contributions to cryptography, such as the Cramer-Shoup encryption, which is adopted in an international ISO standard, and for the hash proof systems building on this research. Other examples are his work on cryptographic protocol theory (such as the Sigma protocols), and mathematical aspects of secure multi-party computation – privacy-protecting cooperation between parties that do not trust each other – including arithmetic secret sharing and connections with algebraic geometry and the theory of error correcting codes. In recent years, he also focused on the mathematics of quantum-safe cryptology.

During his career, Ronald Cramer received various honors. For example, in 1998 he received the first Christiaan Huygens Prize from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) for his PhD thesis from 1996. He was awarded the senior career development VICI by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) in 2006. From 2005-2010 he was a member of the inaugural class of the Young Academy of the KNAW. In 2011 he was Invited Speaker at the EUROCRYPT conference. In 2013, Cramer was selected Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) for his “fundamental contributions to cryptography”. In the same year, he was also elected Member of the KNAW for his “groundbreaking applications of classical mathematics in cryptography”. He served as a Program Chair for EUROCRYPT 2005, PKC 2008 and TCC 2012. Cramer is an author of the textbook Secure Multi-Party Computation and Secret Sharing (Cambridge, 2015). In 2017 he received an ERC Advanced Grant of 2.5 million euro for his proposal ‘Algebraic Methods for Stronger Crypto’ for his novel ideas towards groundbreaking research that impacts both science and society at large.

Also in 2017, he was member of a team of 6 PI’s who were awarded an NWO Gravitation Grant (QSC, 18 million euros).

About CWI: Founded in 1946, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) is the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands. It is located at Amsterdam Science Park and is part of the Institutes Organisation of NWO. The institute is internationally renowned. Over 150 researchers conduct pioneering research and share their acquired knowledge with society. Over 30 researchers are also employed as professors at universities. The institute has generated twenty-eight spin-off companies.