Ignacio Cascudo

Department of Mathematical Sciences

Aalborg University



Since 1 September 2017 I am an Associate Professor in the Mathematics Department of Aalborg University, Denmark. I am a member of the research group Reliable and Secure Communication

Previously I held the following positions:
  • April 2016-August 2017: Assistant Professor at Department Mathematics, Aalborg University.
  • April 2014-March 2016: Postdoc at Aarhus University, under the supervision of Prof. Ivan Damgård
  • July 2010-February 2014: Postdoc at CWI-Centrum Wiskunde en Informatica, Amsterdam, under the supervision of Prof. Ronald Cramer
  • April 2006-June 2010: PhD student at University of Oviedo, under the supervision of Prof. Consuelo Martínez and Ronald Cramer
Contact
*Name: My full name is Ignacio Cascudo Pueyo. As Spaniard, I have two surnames, Cascudo coming from my father and Pueyo from my mother. Cascudo is therefore a surname and not a middle name, and I actually don't have a middle name. I have started to ignore the second surname now, since it basically leads to confusion to many non-Hispanic people. More information on the ''exciting'' ;) topic of Spanish surnames.
Also a common nickname for Ignacio in Spain is "Nacho".
Research Projects:

Member of the project SECURE , funded by Aalborg University under its Call for Interdisciplinary Research Projects, where I am leader for the Workpackage ``Secure Computation''.

Current PhD. students and postdocs:

PhD. students: Postdocs Past PhD. students:

Publications :

Depending on the time you access this page, you may find more up-to-date info in: Ignacio Cascudo, Jaron Skovsted Gundersen, Diego Ruano: Improved Bounds on the Threshold Gap in Ramp Secret Sharing [preprint]. To be published in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, DOI:10.1109/TIT.2019.2902151.

Ignacio Cascudo: On squares of cyclic codes [paper] [preprint] . IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Volume: 65 , Issue: 2, pages: 1034 - 1047, 2019. DOI:10.1109/TIT.2018.2867873 .

Ignacio Cascudo, René Bødker Christensen, Jaron Skovsted Gundersen: Actively Secure OT-Extension from q-ary Linear Codes [paper] [preprint]. Security and Cryptography for Networks (SCN 2018), Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 11035, pages 333-348, 2018.

Ignacio Cascudo, Ronald Cramer, Chaoping Xing, Chen Yuan: Amortized Complexity of Information-Theoretically Secure MPC Revisited [paper] [preprint]. [Talk at CRYPTO18]. Advances in Cryptology-CRYPTO 2018, Part III, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 10993, pages 395-426, 2018.

Ignacio Cascudo, Ivan Damgård, Oriol Farràs and Samuel Ranellucci: Resource-efficient OT combiners with active security [paper] [preprint]. Theory of Cryptography (TCC 2017), Proceedings, Part II. Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 10678, pages 461-486, 2017. DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-70503-3_15 .

Ignacio Cascudo and Bernardo David: SCRAPE: Scalable Randomness Attested by Public Entities [paper] [preprint]. Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS 2017), Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 10355, pages 537-556, 2017.

Ignacio Cascudo, Ivan Damgård, Felipe Lacerda and Samuel Ranellucci: Oblivious Transfer from Any Non-Trivial Elastic Noisy Channels via Secret Key Agreement [paper] [preprint]. Theory of Cryptography (TCC 2016-B), Proceedings, Part I. Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 9985, pages 204-234, 2016.

Ignacio Cascudo, Ivan Damgård, Bernardo David, Nico Döttling and Jesper Buus Nielsen: Rate-1, Linear Time and Additively Homomorphic UC Commitments [paper] [preprint]. Advances in Cryptology-CRYPTO 2016, Part III, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 9816, pages 179-207, 2016.

Ignacio Cascudo: Secret Sharing Schemes with Algebraic Properties and Applications. Pursuit of the Universal: 12th Conference on Computability in Europe, CiE2016. Pages 68-77, 2016.

Ignacio Cascudo: Powers of codes and applications to cryptography. IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2015. DOI: 10.1109/ITW.2015.7133155 .

Ignacio Cascudo, Ronald Cramer, Diego Mirandola, Carles Padro and Chaoping Xing: On secret sharing with nonlinear product reconstruction. SIAM J. Discrete Math. 29(2): 1114-1131 (2015).

Ignacio Cascudo, Ronald Cramer, Diego Mirandola and Gilles Zemor: Squares of Random Linear Codes. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Volume:61 (2015), Issue 3, Pages: 1159-1173. DOI: 10.1109/TIT.2015.2393251 .

Ignacio Cascudo, Ivan Damgård, Bernardo David, Irene Giacomelli, Jesper Buus Nielsen and Roberto Trifiletti: Additively Homomorphic UC commitments with Optimal Amortized Overhead. Proceedings of Public-Key Cryptography -- PKC 2015, Springer Verlag LNCS, vol. 9020, pp. 495-515, 2015.

Ignacio Cascudo, Ronald Cramer and Chaoping Xing: Torsion Limits and Riemann-Roch Systems for Function Fields and Applications. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Volume:60 (2014), Issue: 7, Pages: 3871 - 3888. DOI: 10.1109/TIT.2014.2314099. DOI: 10.1109/TIT.2014.2314099 . ArXiv version

Ignacio Cascudo, Ronald Cramer, Chaoping Xing: Bounds on the Threshold Gap in Secret Sharing and its Applications. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Volume: 59 (2013), Issue: 9, Pages: 5600 - 5612. DOI:10.1109/TIT.2013.2264504 . Eprint version.

Ignacio Cascudo, Ronald Cramer, Chaoping Xing: The Arithmetic Codex. Proceedings of IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW) 2012, pp. 75 - 79, IEEE, 2012 (invited talk by R. Cramer). DOI: 10.1109/ITW.2012.6404767 Corrected version in the Eprint.

Ignacio Cascudo, Ronald Cramer, Chaoping Xing and An Yang: Asymptotic Bound for Multiplication Complexity in the Extensions of Small Finite Fields. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Volume: 58 (2012), Issue: 7, Pages: 4930 - 4935. DOI:10.1109/TIT.2011.2180696 .

Ignacio Cascudo, Ronald Cramer and Chaoping Xing: The Torsion-Limit for Algebraic Function Fields and Its Application to Arithmetic Secret Sharing. Advances in Cryptology - CRYPTO 2011, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011, Volume 6841/2011, 685-705, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-22792-9_39
You can watch here a video of my presentation talk at CRYPTO 2011 (Youtube).

Ignacio Cascudo, Hao Chen, Ronald Cramer and Chaoping Xing: Asymptotically Good Ideal Linear Secret Sharing with Strong Multiplication over Any Fixed Finite Field Advances in Cryptology - CRYPTO 2009, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009, Volume 5677/2009, 466-486

Hao Chen, Ronald Cramer, Robbert de Haan, Ignacio Cascudo: Strongly Multiplicative Ramp Schemes from High Degree Rational Points on Curves. Advances in Cryptology - EUROCRYPT 2008 Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2008, Volume 4965/2008, 451-470

Preprints in online repositories (list likely not up-to-date or complete and does not include prepints of published papers):

Ignacio Cascudo, Jaron Skovsted Gundersen, Diego Ruano Squares of Matrix-product Codes [link]

Ignacio Cascudo, Ivan Damgård, Bernardo David, Nico Döttling, Rafael Dowsley, Irene Giacomelli: Efficient UC Commitment Extension with Homomorphism for Free (and Applications) [link]

Ignacio Cascudo, Ivan Damgård, Oriol Farràs and Samuel Ranellucci: Server-Aided Two-Party Computation with Simultaneous Corruption [link]. Partially superseeded by "Resource-efficient OT combiners with active security", see Publications.

PhD. Thesis: On Asymptotically Good Strongly Multiplicative Linear Secret Sharing (In English, with introduction and conclusions in both Spanish and English). Advisors: Ronald Cramer, Consuelo Martinez. Universidad de Oviedo. More details (in Spanish)

Organization:

I was an organizer of Breaking Borders in Research III , a conference organized by the Spanish Scientists in Denmark (CED/SFD), March 2019.

I was a scientific organizer of a two-week Workshop on Information Theoretic Cryptography at the Lorentz Center (Leiden University) in May 2013.

Together with Alp Bassa and Ronald Cramer I organized a Workshop on Crypto, Coding and Geometry which took place in the CWI on November 18-19, 2010.


Participation in committees/editorial boards:
Past
Program Committee Member of ICITS 2013 , Asiacrypt 2015, ICITS 2017, and Eurocrypt 2018.
Publicity co-chair for ICITS 2016

Other Recent/Future Events: I have given or will be giving invited talks or tutorials at the following venues.

International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM), Valencia, Spain, July 2019.

Workshop on Mathematics of Information - Theoretic Cryptography, NUS, Singapore, September 2016.

CiE 2016, Paris, June 2016

IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW), Jerusalem, April 2015.

Workshop on Applications of Algebraic Geometry in Secret Sharing and Coding Theory, Aalborg, June 2014.

Special Semester on Applications of Algebra and Number Theory, RICAM, Linz, November 2013

SIAM Conference on Applied Algebraic Geometry, Colorado State University, August 2013.

Workshop "Mathematics of Information-Theoretic Cryptography", in the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics in UCLA, February 28 - March 4, 2011.

Teaching:

Student PBL projects:
Following the PBL (problem based learning) principle, much of the teaching in Aalborg University takes place through group projects. I have supervised projects in the following topics: Courses: Master thesis supervision:

Regular master theses EVU (Efter-of videruddanelse, continued education) master projects: Qualification exam, as part of 4+4 PhD. program
(Slightly more) Fun stuff:

I was vice-delegate in Aalborg of the association of Spanish Scientists in Denmark (CED-SFD).

I was in the board of the PhD and postdoc House Activity group of Aarhus University in the summer-fall of 2015. If you are a PhD. student or postdoc at AU, I encourage to join some of the events organized by the group.

In 2012, I played a small stunt in a short movie titled the Cat (although you won't see my face) directed by my friend Giannicola Scarpa. The movie competed in the Quantum Shorts Film Competition organized by CQT, National University of Singapore. Although it didn't win a prize, it ended second in the Popular Choice award .

I participated in the International Mathematical Olympiad in 2001 (Washington, USA).

I used to play chess at a strong club player level. I had a 2100+ FIDE Elo Rating when I ''retired''.