Jan Bobolz

Hi! My name is Jan Bobolz (Jan: J as in yield, and short a as in father. Roughly Yie-a-n. Rhymes with “fun”. But I’m fine with any variation of my name, too 👍). I’m a research associate at the University of Edinburgh in the ZK-Lab. Before, I was a PhD student at Paderborn University.

I am interested in (privacy-preserving) cryptography. Today, we regularly reveal private data that seems to be necessary for operation of a service, but really isn’t.

For example, we scan our customer loyalty card when grocery shopping, which uniquely identifies us. While this seems necessary (how else are they going to know which database entry to increment?), with cryptography, we can remove the central database from the picture completely and instead let every user store their own (authenticated) point count on their phone.

Ideally, we’ll end up living in a world without huge databases containing your personal data. Instead you control your data and only disclose carefully chosen statements about it.

Research interests

I’m broadly interested in provable security and privacy-preserving cryptography. This means that I design new systems, model their security properties, and prove them secure.

I have done work around the following topics:

• Anonymous credentials [ACNS 2018, CCS 2019, CANS 2021]
• Privacy-preserving loyalty systems [CCS 2019, AsiaCCS 2020]
• Implementation of privacy-preserving cryptography [ePrint 2021]
• Game-theoretic multi-party computation [TCC 2023]
• Lattice-based cryptography [Asiacrypt 2023]

See the research page for more information.

I am also currently working on:

• Zero-knowledge proofs