Martin Albrecht

I'm a grad student at the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London. Before I studied computer science at Universität Bremen, Germany. This page is rather static and most recent stuff is posted in the blog, so you probably want to go there.

Academic Interests

My main (current) academic interests include:

symmetric key cryptology and cryptanalysis: block ciphers mainly
applications of computational algebra in cryptology
computational algebra in general

Talks

A list of presentations I've given including slides where appropriate:

13.07.2004 - Liouvillesche Sätze with Georg Lippold (AlZAGK Seminar, Bremen, Germany)
05.11.2004 - Das Buchberger Kritierum (AlZAGK Seminar, Bremen, Germany)
17.06.2005 - Reflexionsgruppen (AlZAGK Bremen, Germany)
11.03.2006 - RSA (Oberwiesenthal, Germany)
06.10.2006 - Gröbner Bases in SAGE (SAGE Days 2, Seattle, USA)
07.10.2006 - Pyrex (SAGE Days 2, Seattle, USA)
10.01.2007 - Algebraic Attacks against CTC (Colloquium, Bremen, Germany)
18.01.2007 - CTC (Kaiserslautern, Germany)
19.01.2007 - CTC (Darmstadt, Germany)
12.02.2007 - Commutative Algebra in SAGE (Seattle, USA)
14.02.2007 - Pyrex (Seattle, USA)
19.02.2007 - Pyrex (SAGE Days 3, Los Angeles, USA)
01.03.2007 - Algebraic Attacks (Seattle, USA)
04.05.2007 - SAGE (ECrypt PhD Summerschool, Samos, Greece)
30.09.2007 - Status Report: Commutative Algebra (SAGE Days 5, Cambridge, USA)
01.11.2007 - Not Reinventing the Wheel: A Sage Introduction (PhD Seminar, Egham, UK)
10.11.2007 - Sage for Mathematical and Cryptographic Research (Sage Days 6, Bristol, UK
29.11.2007 - Synergy Effects - A Sage Introduction (Les Trophees due libre 2007, Soissons, FR)
21.02.2008 - Algebraic Techniques in Differential Cryptanalysis (ISG Seminar, Egham, UK)
15.03.2008 - Sage: Creating a Viable Alternative to the Four Ms (OKCon, London, UK)
28.04.2008 - Algebraic Techniques in Differential Cryptanalysis (SCC 2008, Beijing, China)
20.06.2008 - XOR for Fun and Profit (Sage dev1, Seattle, USA)
10.10.2008 - Matrix Multiplication over GF(2) in the M4RI Library (Sage Days 10, Nancy, France)
29.10.2008 - Algebraic Attacks on Block Ciphers (Open Day, Cambridge, UK)
06.11.2008 - Open Source Mathematics: Sage (PhD Seminar, Egham, UK)
27.11.2008 - Matrix F5 for the Working Cryptographer (PhD Seminar, Egham, UK)
24.02.2009 - Algebraic Techniques in Differential Cryptanalysis (FSE 2009, Leuven, Belgium)

Software

I've written a tiny KDE/Qt-tool called ValueKonverter which converts (arbitrary) data from/to various types. This application is basically a clone of the Value Converter found in Mathemaesthetics Inc's Resorcerer. You may want to compare screenshots to see what this means: ValueKonverter vs. Value Converter. I didn't touch it in a while but if you're interested check it out here.

pdfbook.pl is tiny script (I also didn't touch in a while) which performs on PDF documents what psbook does to PostScript documents. It relies on pdftk and PDFJam. Grab it here ().

I am a developer for the Sage mathematics software. My $HOME directory on the main Sage development machine is publically viewable.

I am the maintainer for the M4RI library for fast arithmetic with dense matrices over GF(2).

Publications

Peer-reviewed publications:

Martin Albrecht, Kenny Paterson and Gaven Watson. Plaintext Recovery Attacks Against SSH to appear in Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2009. available locally. 2009.
Martin Albrecht and Carlos Cid. Algebraic Techniques in Differential Cryptanalysis to appear in Proceedings of Fast Software Encryption 2009. pre-print available at http://eprint.iacr.org/2008/177. 2009. (source code)
Martin Albrecht. Algebraic Attacks against the Courtois Toy Cipher in Cryptologia, Volume 32, Issue 3 July 2008 , pages 220 - 276. available at informaworld. 2008.
M. Albrecht, T. Backhaus, S. Planthaber, H. Stöppler, D. Spenneberg and F. Kirchner. AIMEE: A Four-Legged Robot for Robocup Rescue in Proceedings of CLAWAR 2005. available at citeseer. 2005.
Dirk Spenneberg, Martin Albrecht and Till Backhaus. M.O.N.S.T.E.R.: A new Behavior-Bases Microkernel for Mobile Robots in Proceedings of the 2nd European Conference on Mobile Robots. available at citeseer. 2005.
D. Spenneberg, A. Strack, J. Hilljegerdes, H. Zschenker, M. Albrecht, T. Backhaus and F. Kirchner. ARAMIES: A Four-Legged Climbing and Walking Robot in Proceedings of 8th International Symposium iSAIRAS. available at citeseer. 2005.

Other publications:

Martin Albrecht, Craig Gentry, Shai Halevi and Jonathan Katz. Attacking Cryptographic Schemes Based on "Perturbation Polynomials". pre-print available at http://eprint.iacr.org/2009/098. 2009.
Martin Albrecht, Gregory Bard and Bill Hart. Efficient Multiplication of Dense Matrices over GF(2). pre-print available at http://arxiv.org/abs/0811.1714. 2008.
Martin Albrecht, Gregory Bard et al.. M4RI Library. 2007ff.
William Stein et al.. Sage mathematics software. 2005ff.
Martin Albrecht. Algebraic Attacks against the Courtois Toy Cipher. Diplomarbeit at Universität Bremen. 2007.

Links

Information Security Group at RHUL :: the working group I'm at
Robotics Lab :: my former employer
AlZAGK Working Group :: algorithms, number theory, algebraic geometry and cryptography (german)
Junge Linke :: versus capital and nation (German)
Battrock.de :: good music (German)
iliketotallyloveit :: a dotcom I co-founded.