Kathrin Hövelmanns

Kathrin is a tenured assistant professor holding an Irène Curie Fellowship in the Applied and Provable Security group at Eindhoven’s University of Technology (TU/e). Her research is driven by the question how to mitigate the threat posed by quantum computers to how we communicate sensitive data today. (‘Communicating sensitive data’ = wiring money, logging in to a webpage, exchanging sensitive information like medical data or company/governmental/military secrets, using Whatsapp…)

She mainly works on cryptographic algorithms that can be used on today’s computers, but remain secure even under quantum attacks. Her work in this area contributed to the theoretical groundwork for an emerging NIST standard for public-key encryption called Kyber. (You will be using this, e.g., whenever you’re visiting a webpage whose URL starts with https.) In her work, she develops formal security proofs (this research area is called ‘provable security’) by developing and integrating new theoretical tools that are based in quantum information theory.