Martin Gagné

I am a research engineer (whatever that's supposed to mean -- basically, I do research and I teach) at the Laboratoire VERIMAG at l'Université Joseph Fourier. I work mainly on automated verification of cryptographic protocols.

Before joining VERIMAG, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary in the iCORE Information Security Laboratory. My main research there was efficient pairing-based cryptography.

My contract at the Laboratoire VERIMAG ends in 2012, so I will need a new job soon. If you are thinking of hiring me, you may want to look here for more information about me.

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.

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.

Teaching

In Fall 2011, I'll be animating the exercise sessions of the course "Security models: proofs, protocols and politics", part of the Master Pro 2 on Security, Cryptology and Information Coding. If you were looking for information on that course, got lost and stumbled here, I suggest you click on the link above. Not much else here.

Education

I received my Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of California, Davis, in 2008. My supervisor was Matthew Franklin. Before that, I got my Master's degree in Combinatorics and Optimization (their cryptography group is in there for some reason) at the University of Waterloo. I did my undergrad at McGill University in Mathematics and Computer Science.

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