Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Education
Ph.D., Computer Science, University of California, Davis, September 2008
M. Math, Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo, October 2002
B. Sc., Mathematics and Computer Science, McGill University, June 2001
Publications
- “Automated Proofs of Block Cipher Modes of Operation.”, Martin Gagné, Pascal Lafourcade, Yassine Lakhnech, Reihaneh Safavi-Naini, Journal of Automated Reasoning, vol. 56 no. 1, 2016.
- “Fully Secure Inner-Product Proxy Re-Encryption with Constant Size Ciphertext.”, Michael Backes, Martin Gagné, Sri Aravinda Krishnan Thyagarajan, Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Security in Cloud Computing (SCC), 2015.
- “Automated Security Proofs for Almost-Universal Hash for MAC Verification.”, Martin Gagné, Pascal Lafourcade, Yassine Lakhnech, Proceedings of the European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS), 2013.
- “Using mobile device communication to strengthen e-Voting protocols.”, Michael Backes, Martin Gagné, Malte Skoruppa, Proceedings of the Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES), 2013.
See personal web page for complete list.
Research Interests
Automated verification of cryptographic protocols: I try to teach computers how to produce or verify proofs of cryptographic protocols. It’s not easy. Computers are stupid. We have had a fair bit of success so far with symmetric encryption based on block ciphers, are currently working on message authentication codes. We hope to move on to public key encryption soon. I’m currently working on the verification of the e-voting protocol developed by the Norwegian government for their public elections.
Electronic Voting: I develop electronic voting protocols that preserve the voter’s privacy and the authenticity of their vote even when malware may have contaminated some of their devices. I also plan to make user studies to determine the usefulness of the techniques I design.
Pairing-based cryptography: While in Calgary, I did research in efficient cryptographic protocols using pairings. I was particularly interested in making efficient attribute-based encryption and signature algorithms, either by improving on previously constructed protocols, or by specializing their functionality. I’m currently trying to do away with the paring operation in identity-based and attribute-based cryptosystems by using hardware tokens.