Visiting Researcher Talk: Prof Ronald Cramer | 17 October 2025

Talk title: 

Code Products in Secure Multiparty Computation: Arithmetic Secret Sharing (1997--)

Speaker:

Prof Ronald Cramer

About the speaker:

Prof. Dr. Ronald Cramer is the head and founder of the Cryptology Group at CWI Amsterdam, the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science, and a Full Professor of Mathematics at Leiden University, positions he has held since 1 June 2004. Prior to this, he held appointments at ETH Zurich and Aarhus University (1997–2004). Since 2008, he has also served as a Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. His primary research area is cryptology.

Prof. Cramer has received numerous honours, including being named a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) in 2013 and becoming a Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) the same year. His accolades include the 2023 ESORICS Outstanding Research Award, a 2016 ERC Advanced Investigator Grant, keynote speaker at IACR EUROCRYPT 2011, the 2003 Distinguished Cryptographer Lecture Series at NTT Research (Tokyo), and the 1998 KNAW Christiaan Huygens Award for his 1996 PhD thesis.

In the Netherlands, Prof. Cramer currently serves as a sounding board member of the national “Quantum-Safe Government’’ programme under the Ministry of the Interior and co-initiator of the “PQC Migration Manual’’ project commissioned by the same ministry. He is also co-initiator and co-organiser of the national CWI-TNO Symposium Series on Migration to Post-Quantum Cryptography (now in its seventh edition), as well as its EU-level successor conference to be held in The Hague on 2–3 December 2025, jointly organised with the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and the cybersecurity regulators ANSSI (France) and BSI (Germany). In 2024, he was invited to speak on Migration to Post-Quantum Cryptography at Singapore International Cyber Week.

Description:

In this talk, Prof. Cramer will survey the historical development of code products within the field of secure multiparty computation, with a particular focus on arithmetic secret sharing and its applications. This line of research spans nearly thirty years and has played a foundational role in advancing modern cryptographic protocols.

The talk will highlight results that achieve strong asymptotic properties, many of which rely on algebraic geometry codes in various forms. While much of the classical work has centred on codes over finite fields, recent developments—driven by new applications in secure multiparty computation—have shifted attention toward code products and arithmetic secret sharing over certain classes of rings. These emerging directions open up promising avenues for both theory and practice in secure computation.