Currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Crypto Group of UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
I received my B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in IT-Security (IT-Sicherheit/Informationstechnik) from Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, in 2014 and 2016, respectively. During my doctoral studies I have been part of the Embedded Security, Security Engineering and Implementation Security groups of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments. In 2021 I obtained my Ph.D. degree for the thesis Physical security for next generation CMOS ICs with summa cum laude.
My research interests include the secure implementation of cryptographic algorithms in hardware and software, as well as the development of novel cryptographic schemes that facilitate the application of countermeasures against implementation-level attacks. I am also an experienced digital IC designer and have led the development and tape-out of 7 different ASIC prototypes since 2017 - all within the scope of projects dealing with the secure implementation of cryptography on digital chips.
I am passionate about open-source hardware and software and strongly believe that free, transparent and open technologies are key ingredients to our digital security and sovereignty. In the future I want to encourage more (applied) cryptographers to embrace Kerckhoffs's principle all the way down to the implementation/silicon level, a vision also shared by SIMPLE Crypto - The Secure Cryptographic Implementation Association.