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 currently a researcher at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute in the Identity Management group. Before, I was a research associate at the University of Edinburgh in the ZK-Lab and before that, I was a PhD student at Paderborn University.

Research interests

I’m interested in cryptography, more specifically provable security, where the security of new cryptographic systems is established through mathematical proof. My goal is to advance the theory of provable security with new techniques and frameworks, and to design new cryptographic systems.

Advancing the theory of provable security

Provable security is supposed inspire strong confidence in the security of a system.

Unfortunately, provable security is not perfect: Proofs and definitions quickly become very complex, and it is easy for researchers to make mistakes, undermining the confidence in their result and ultimately in the research field as a whole. To help avoid mistakes, I formalize reusable proof techniques and proof frameworks, which simplify the process for future proofs (and perhaps make new proofs possible in the first place).

I am also working on composability, i.e., definition styles and proof techniques that allow us to create a large system from smaller components while preserving security.

Designing new cryptographic systems

I am particularly interested in privacy-preserving cryptographic systems. 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.