David Pointcheval is a French cryptographer. He is currently the Chief scientific officer (CSO) of Cosmian (on leave from CNRS), a French deeptech company in public cloud security. He is a Senior Researcher at CNRS, and the former head of the Computer Science Department and Cryptography Laboratory at the

École normale supérieure École or Ecole may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by Secondary education in France, secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing i ...

. He is mainly known for his contributions in the area of provable security, including the Forking lemma, the Pointcheval-Stern signature algorithm, and his contributions to Password-authenticated key agreement.

Biography

An alumnus of the

École Normale Supérieure École or Ecole may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by Secondary education in France, secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing i ...

, David Pointcheval obtained his Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Caen Normandy. In 1998, he joined the

French National Centre for Scientific Research The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 engi ...

, working within the Computer Science department of

. Since then, his research has focused mostly on

asymmetric cryptography Public-key cryptography, or asymmetric cryptography, is the field of cryptographic systems that use pairs of related keys. Each key pair consists of a public key and a corresponding private key. Key pairs are generated with cryptographic alg ...

and

Provable security Provable security refers to any type or level of computer security that can be proved. It is used in different ways by different fields. Usually, this refers to mathematical proofs, which are common in cryptography. In such a proof, the capabilit ...

, of which he was one of the pioneers. He has authored more than 100 international publications, and co-invented a dozen patents. He was awarded a

European Research Council The European Research Council (ERC) is a public body for funding of scientific and technological research conducted within the European Union (EU). Established by the European Commission in 2007, the ERC is composed of an independent Scientific ...

Advanced Grant in 2015. In 2021 he received the

RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics Formally called since 2025 The RSAC Conference Award for Excellence in Mathematics, is an annual award. It is announced at the annual RSA Conference in recognition of innovations and contributions in the field of cryptography. An award committee o ...

.Archived a
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References

External links

David Pointcheval's personal page
* List of publications o
Google Scholar
French cryptographers Academic staff of the École Normale Supérieure Living people Public-key cryptographers Year of birth missing (living people) {{crypto-bio-stub