Roman Walch

Roman Walch

Co-founder of TACEO GmbH, Ph.D. Student, and Researcher in Cryptography

TACEO GmbH

Know-Center GmbH

IAIK, TU Graz

Biography

I am a co-founder of TACEO GmbH, researcher in cryptography, and Ph.D. student at Know-Center GmbH in cooperation with the Institute of Applied Information Processing and Communications (IAIK) at Graz University of Technology. Before this, I completed my BSc and Dipl.-Ing. (equivalent to MSc) in computer engineering at TU Graz, with a focus on IT-Security. My main research interests include privacy enhancing technologies (FHE, MPC, ZKP), domain-specific symmetric primitives, and their application to real-world use cases.

Interests

  • (Fully) Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)
  • Multiparty Computation (MPC)
  • Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP)
  • Post-Quantum Signatures
  • Efficient Implementations
  • Ciphers for MPC, FHE, and ZKP

Education

  • MSc in Information and Computer Engineering, 2019

    Graz University of Technology

  • BSc in Information and Computer Engineering, 2017

    Graz University of Technology

Featured Publications

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CryptoTL: Private, efficient and secure transfer learning

Big data has been a pervasive catchphrase in recent years, but dealing with data scarcity has become a crucial question for many …
Roman Walch, Samuel Sousa, Lukas Helminger, Stefanie Lindstaedt, Christian Rechberger, Andreas Trügler
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A New Feistel Approach Meets Fluid-SPN: Griffin for Zero-Knowledge Applications

Zero-knowledge (ZK) applications form a large group of use cases in modern cryptography, and recently gained in popularity due to novel …
Lorenzo Grassi, Yonglin Hao, Christian Rechberger, Markus Schofnegger, Roman Walch, Qingju Wang
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From Farfalle to Megafono via Ciminion: The PRF Hydra for MPC Applications

The area of multi-party computation (MPC) has recently increased in popularity and number of use cases. At the current state of the …
Lorenzo Grassi, Morten Øygarden, Markus Schofnegger, Roman Walch
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Pasta: A Case for Hybrid Homomorphic Encryption

The idea of hybrid homomorphic encryption (HHE) is to drastically reduce bandwidth requirements when using homomorphic encryption (HE) …
Christoph Dobraunig, Lorenzo Grassi, Lukas Helminger, Christian Rechberger, Markus Schofnegger, Roman Walch
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Privately Connecting Mobility to Infectious Diseases via Applied Cryptography

Recent work has shown that cell phone mobility data has the unique potential to create accurate models for human mobility and …
Alexandros Bampoulidis, Alessandro Bruni, Lukas Helminger, Daniel Kales, Christian Rechberger, Roman Walch
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Featured Talks

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Privately Connecting Mobility to Infectious Diseases via Applied Cryptography

Recent work has shown that cell phone mobility data has the unique potential to create accurate models for human mobility and …
Jul 12, 2022 PETS 2022 -- Sydney, Australia and Online
Slides

Pasta: A Case for Hybrid Homomorphic Encryption

May 29, 2022 FHE.org 2022
Slides

Multi-Party Revocation in Sovrin: Performance through Distributed Trust

Accumulators provide compact representations of large sets and compact membership witnesses. Besides constant-size witnesses, …
May 20, 2021 CT-RSA 2021 -- Virtual Event
Slides

Efficient FPGA Implementations of LowMC and Picnic

Post-quantum cryptography has received increased attention in recent years, in particular, due to the standardization effort by NIST. …
Feb 27, 2020 CT-RSA 2020 -- Moscone Center, SF, USA
Slides

Teaching

I am currently involved with the following courses at TU Graz:

Additionally, I am supervising bachelor’s thesis, seminar projects and master’s thesis at TU Graz.

I also had the pleasure to (co-)supervise various bachelor’s and master’s thesis:

  • Patrick Schwarz: Privacy Preserving Machine Learning (co-supervised with Lukas Helminger)
  • Mathias Oberhuber: Implementation of ECDSA and MiMC with Minimal Overhead on Hardware (co-supervised with Markus Schofnegger)
  • Jakob Feiner: Lightweight Communication for Secure Outsourced Homomorphic Computation
  • Shibam Mukherjee: Privacy Preserving Recommender Systems
  • Roman Holler: Fitting Huge Datasets into Zero-Knowledge Proof Systems
  • Peter Waldert: Secure Classification as a Service
  • Fabian Schmid: Multi-Key Homomorphic Encryption in SEAL
  • Florian Lackner: Evaluating Multi-key Homomorphic Encryption in Federated Learning (co-supervised with Mathias Böhm)

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