Nadim Kobeissi
Co-Host of Cryptography FM
Nadim currently runs Symbolic Software, a Paris-based applied cryptography consulting office. As its director, he manages a small team that offers security audits, cryptographic protocol design and formal verification services. Since its founding in 2018, Symbolic Software has completed and delivered over 200 software and cryptographic audits for clients all around the world.
Nadim is also the author of Verifpal, new software for verifying the security of cryptographic protocols. Building upon contemporary research in symbolic formal verification, Verifpal’s main aim is to appeal more to real-world practitioners, students and engineers without sacrificing comprehensive formal verification features.
In 2018, Nadim defended his Ph.D. thesis, Formal Verification for Real-World Cryptographic Protocols and Implementations, at Inria Paris, after 3½ years of research with team PROSECCO. In 2018 and 2019, Nadim also designed and taught the computer security course at New York University's Paris campus, where he served as an adjunct professor.
Nadim Kobeissi has hosted 24 Episodes.
-
Episode 12: Special Real World Crypto 2021 Pre-Conference Coverage!
January 7th, 2021 | 1 hr 37 mins
real world crypto
In this special episode, Nadim and Benjamin go through the entire program of IACR Real World Crypto 2021 in preparation for an exciting conference!
-
Episode 11: Breaking the Rainbow Post-Quantum Cryptography Candidate!
December 8th, 2020 | 38 mins 8 secs
post-quantum cryptography, signature schemes
Serious weaknesses are uncovered in one of NIST's post-quantum cryptography finalists. Ward Beullens joins us to talk about his new research and more.
-
Episode 10: Exploiting Authenticated Encryption Key Commitment!
December 1st, 2020 | 46 mins 34 secs
authenticated encryption
Ange Albertini and Stefan Kölbl discuss how new research from Google, the University of Haifa and Amazon is exploiting authenticated encryption to make a PDF decrypt into... a different PDF. And much more.
-
Episode 9: Off-the-Record Messaging and PKI Implementations!
November 20th, 2020 | 41 mins 41 secs
secure messaging
Sofía Celi of Cloudflare talks about the latest version of Off-the-Record secure messaging protocol, why deniability is important, and more.
-
Episode 8: Breaking Elliptic-Curve Signatures With LadderLeak!
November 17th, 2020 | 42 mins 29 secs
elliptic curve cryptography, side channel attacks
LadderLeak is a new attack that exploits side channels present in ECDSA, claiming to allow real-world breaking of ECDSA with less than a bit of nonce leakage. But what does “less than a bit” mean in this context? Is LadderLeak really that effective at breaking ECDSA, with so little information to go on? Joining us this episode are LadderLeak co-authors Akira Takahashi, Mehdi Tibouchi and Yuval Yarom to discuss these questions and more.
-
Episode 7: Scaling Up Secure Messaging to Large Groups With MLS!
November 10th, 2020 | 45 mins 10 secs
secure messaging
Raphael Robert from Wire talks about how MLS wants to scale secure messaging to groups with hundreds or even thousands of participants.
-
Episode 6: Proving the Existence of Vulnerabilities With Zero-Knowledge Proofs!
November 3rd, 2020 | 41 mins 26 secs
zero-knowledge proofs
Dr. David Archer of Galois discusses using zero-knowledge proof in order to prove the existence (or lack of) a software vulnerability without sharing details about the vulnerability itself.
-
Episode 5: Isogeny-based Cryptography for Dummies!
October 27th, 2020 | 48 mins 34 secs
isogenies
Luca Deo Feo and Hart Montgomery try to explain isogeny-based cryptography to Nadim.
-
Episode 4: Formally Verifying Your Taxes With Catala!
October 20th, 2020 | 43 mins 56 secs
formal methods
Formal verification has been used to prove the security of cryptographic protocols like Signal and TLS – but can it also be used to verify the correctness of legislation? Denis Merigoux tells us about how Catala wants to use formal methods to verify the French tax code.
-
Episode 3: BLAKE3, A Parallelizable Hash Function Using Merkle Trees!
October 13th, 2020 | 45 mins 36 secs
hash functions
Jack O'Connor and Jean-Philippe Aumasson discuss how Merkle Trees make the new BLAKE3 hash function special, and talk about the design process for the BLAKE family of hash functions in general.
-
Episode 2: Breaking Lightweight Symmetric Cryptography!
October 6th, 2020 | 34 mins 24 secs
cryptanalysis
Léo Perrin talks about how his team at INRIA was able to find serious breaks in the Gimli family of lightweight symmetric primitives, and why NIST's lightweight cryptography competition even matters in the first place, especially with block ciphers like AES dominating the industry.
-
Episode 1: Post-Quantum TLS With KEMs Instead of Signatures!
September 29th, 2020 | 35 mins 43 secs
post-quantum, protocols
KEMTLS is a modified version of TLS 1.3 that uses Key Encapsulation Mechanisms, or KEMs, instead of signatures for server authentication, thereby providing a sort of “post-quantum TLS”. But what even are KEMs? Are quantum computers even a thing that we should be worried about? On the first ever episode of Cryptography FM, we’ll be hosting Dr. Douglas Stebila and PhD Candidate Thom Wiggers to discuss these questions and more.