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Christof Paar (* July 18, 1963, in Cologne) is a German cryptographer. He is one of the founding directors at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy in Bochum, Germany, a "Scientific Member" of the Max Planck Society, [1] IEEE Fellow, [2] and a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. [3]
After training as a telecommunications technician, Christof Paar studied telecommunication engineering at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences (then FH Köln) from 1984 to 1988. After his civilian service, he studied electrical engineering with a specialization in computer technology at the University of Siegen from 1989 to 1991. He wrote his diploma thesis at Michigan Technological University on active noise control. [4] From 1991 to 1994, he was a doctoral student with Han Vinck at the Institute for Experimental Mathematics at the University of Duisburg-Essen (then the University of Essen). [5] His dissertation was on computer architectures for arithmetic in finite fields. [6] From 1995 to 2001, he was an assistant and later an associate professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts for nearly seven years. [7] From 2001 to 2019, he held the Chair of Embedded Security at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. From 2008 to 2009 and from 2014 to 2016, he worked as a Research Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. [8] Since 2019, he is one of the two founding directors of the new Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy in Bochum. [9]
Paar's research deals with the engineering aspects of cryptography. He has significantly contributed to efficient implementing symmetric and asymmetric crypto algorithms, side-channel analysis, embedded systems security, and hardware security. [1] In 1999, he co-founded, with Çetin Koç, CHES (Conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems) at WPI, which has become one of the leading international conferences on cryptography. [10] At Ruhr University Bochum, he established the Horst Görtz Institute for Information Security together with Hans Dobbertin and was instrumental in building Bochum's bachelor's and master's degree programs in the field of IT security. [11] Since 2019, he is co-spokesperson for the Cluster of Excellence "CASA - Cyber Security in the Age of Large-Scale Attackers", together with Eike Kiltz and Angela Sasse. [12] In 2003, Paar founded Escrypt GmbH together with Willi Mannheims, one of the first companies to focus on industrial data security. Since 2012, Escrypt has been part of Robert Bosch GmbH. [13]