Renaud Sirdey Email & Phone Number

As a senior researcher, I worked mainly on the development of a practical technology for computing over encrypted data grounded in homomorphic cryptography as well as other related techniques. With a few colleagues and students, we thus attempted to build the software tools, compilers and RTE required to turn the magic of homomorphic cryptography into a truly usable technology. With that respect I have (notably) lead the EIT project HC@WORKS (pronounced ”ash-cat-works” for Homomorphic Cryptocomputing @ Works), a use case-driven project which aimed at demonstrating the practical value of homomorphic encryption in a first round of real-world settings, I have also contributed (as WP leader and as CEA internal project leader) to the French FUI-funded project CRYPTOCOMP as well as lead a CEA internal project on secure genomic data processing. I was also fairly involved in PhD students supervision, including under the solicitation of other CEA labs or industrial partners, as well as various expertise missions. Then I got promoted to the Research Director level and more or less kept on doing the same things while broadening a little bit my research interests...

The Embedded Real-Time & Security Lab was a research group of 30+ researchers specialized in analysis tools, compilers and operating systems for safety and/or security-critical software-intensive systems. During the period I served as head of lab I have focused mostly on developing the technical foundations of the lab security R&D activities on hardware-assisted secure virtualization as well as homomorphic encryption-based cryptocomputing and worked intensively to have these activities supported by a healthy portfolio of CEA internal, French national as well as European research projects. Having spent more than two years in the service of others, I wanted to have my share of the technical thrill of bringing to life what I consider a truly groundbreaking technology and decided to move into a more operational position by assuming the leadership of (and working on) the main projects I had contributed starting on practical homomorphic encryption and its applications.

A few months after defending my PhD thesis, I joined a newly created lab at CEA focusing on compilation and OS for safety or performance critical systems. Upon my arrival, I was tasked with building and leading a small research team which mission was to design and develop a dataflow compiler, from the programming language specification down to the bare metal micro-kernel, for one of the first ever many-core architectures: the 256 cores MPPA architecture now commercialized by Kalray. Our compiler, which was notably relying on advanced combinatorial optimization techniques, ended up being integrated in Kalray commercial SDK for that chip. In parallel with these responsibilities, I defended my HDR thesis and lead a CEA internal project on cloud computing security (SecureCloud) which most notably allowed me to kick off a thread of R&D activities on homomorphic encryption-based cryptocomputing.

Palaiseau

Did part-time research at Institut de Recherche Technologique SystemX within its flagship cybersecurity project EIC (Environnement d'Interopérabilité pour la Cybersécurité) where we investigated the applications of advanced emerging cryptographic techniques, homomorphic encryption ahead (http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/CloudCom.2016.0069 ; http://dx.doi.org/10.5220/0006697500780088 ; http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26633-2_5) to cybersecurity-related settings. In that project, I also worked a little bit of applications of functional encryption (https://doi.org/10.1109/CSNET.2018.8602714) and lightweight crypto (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26250-1_19) and even did some fun work on an application of blockchain to IoT (http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/EuroSPW.2017.50), although I was very reluctant to work on blockchains as I thought it was overhyped and often seen by people as a solution without a real problem....

As a system architect, I was responsible with my fellow teammates for the specification and design of a fairly complex (more than 10 MLoCs and 50 FRU) high availability distributed switching system. These years involved specifying many fairly complex features, designing quite a few algorithms and protocols as well as doing a lot of telecom system mathematical modelling and dimensioning. It is in parallel with my system architect responsibilities that I carried out my PhD thesis in combinatorial optimization. On top of this, I was also serving as a kind of local applied mathematician, providing much needed expertise in statistics, reliability engineering as well as discrete optimization under the solicitation of other R&D teams.

Moving back to France, I was given the responsibility of a small R&D team responsible for developing the fault tolerance and load balancing middleware for a new generation of distributed GSM Base Station Controller (BSC). This mostly involved work on distributed algorithms, distributed data consistency as well as distributed resource allocation. It is also during that time that I started developing a strong interest in combinatorial optimization since the resource allocation problems cropping up in the above context had to be dealt with using this kind of techniques.

I started my career as a DMS (Digital Multiplex Switch) designer, working on the Home Location Register/Authentication Center which is a high availability real-time database central to the functioning of both 2G and 3G wireless networks. Amongst my early contributions was work on type analysis in the strongly typed PROTEL language to automate the generation of data conversion procedures for zero-downtime upgrades, work on cryptographic random number generation and hash functions used for 2G/3G challenge/response authentication and key establishment as well as work on distributed data consistency in the context of the development of a (by then) massively distributed next generation HLR/AuC architecture.

Habilitation À Diriger Des Recherches, Combinatorial Optimization

My Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches thesis comes back on around a decade of both theoretical and practical contributions to the field.

Phd, Combinatorial Optimization

My PhD thesis dealt with the study of a strongly NP-hard resource-constrained scheduling problem which was approached from different.

Msc, Applied Mathematics

MSc thesis on the subject of multisensor image fusion by means of wavelet techniques, honored by the 1998 Texas Instruments Prize.

Ingénieur, Computer Science