Stefano Tessaro

Contact
MIT CSAIL 32-G696
32 Vassar Street
Cambridge, MA 02139
E-mail: tessaro -(at)- csail -(dot)- mit -(dot)- edu

About me

I am a researcher working on cryptography. Broadly speaking, my research agenda addresses the foundations of topics motivated by practical applications of cryptography, such as for example the design of secure hash functions and block ciphers, password-based cryptography, and physical-layer security.

Currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher at MIT CSAIL, supervised by Shafi Goldwasser. Previously, from October 2010 to January 2012, I was a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego working with Mihir Bellare. I received my PhD in 2010 from ETH Zurich under the supervision of Ueli Maurer.

Activities

• TCC 2013 (Tokyo, Japan), program committee member
• CRYPTO 2011 (Santa Barbara, CA), program committee member
• TCC 2010 (Zurich, Switzerland), local organizing committee member

Publications

• Huijia Lin and Stefano Tessaro
  Amplification of Chosen-Ciphertext Security
  Advances in Cryptology -- EUROCRYPT 2013. May 2013. To appear.
Elette Boyle, Shafi Goldwasser, and Stefano Tessaro.
Communication Locality in Secure Multi-Party Computation: How to Run Sublinear Algorithms in a Distributed Setting
Theory of Cryptography -- TCC 2013. Mar 2013.
Daniele Micciancio and Stefano Tessaro.
An Equational Approach to Secure Multi-Party Computation
Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science -- ITCS 2013. Jan 2013.
Mihir Bellare, Thomas Ristenpart, and Stefano Tessaro
Multi-Instance Security and its Application to Password-Based Cryptography
Advances in Cryptology -- CRYPTO 2012. LNCS, vol. 7417, pp. 312–329, Aug 2012.
Mihir Bellare, Stefano Tessaro, and Alexander Vardy
Semantic Security for the Wiretap Channel [Video]
Advances in Cryptology -- CRYPTO 2012. LNCS, vol. 7417, pp. 294–311, Aug 2012.
This paper combines the following two works: A Cryptographic Treatment of the Wiretap Channel (with M. Bellare and A. Vardy) and Polynomial-Time, Semantically-Secure Encryption Achieving the Secrecy Capacity (with M. Bellare).
Yevgeniy Dodis, Thomas Ristenpart, John Steinberger, and Stefano Tessaro
To Hash or Not to Hash Again? (In)differentiability Results for H² and HMAC
Advances in Cryptology -- CRYPTO 2012. LNCS, vol. 7417, pp. 348-366, Aug 2012.
Peter Gazi and Stefano Tessaro
Efficient and Optimally Secure Key-Length Extension for Block Ciphers via Randomized Cascading
Advances in Cryptology -- EUROCRYPT 2012. LNCS, vol. 7327, pp. 63–80, Apr 2012.
Thomas Holenstein, Robin Künzler, and Stefano Tessaro
The Equivalence of the Random Oracle Model and the Ideal Cipher Model, Revisited
Proceedings of the 43rd ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing — STOC 2011. pp. 89–98, Jun 2011.

Stefano Tessaro
Security Amplification for the Cascade of Arbitrarily Weak PRPs: Tight Bounds via the Interactive Hardcore Lemma
Theory of Cryptography — TCC 2011, LNCS, vol. 6597, pp. 37–54, Mar 2011.
Best student paper award. Invited to the Journal of Cryptology.
Marc Fischlin, Anja Lehmann, Thomas Ristenpart, Thomas Shrimpton, Martijn Stam, and Stefano Tessaro
Random Oracles With(out) Programmability
Advances in Cryptology — ASIACRYPT 2010, LNCS, vol. 6477, pp. 303–320, Dec 2010.
Ueli Maurer and Stefano Tessaro
A Hardcore Lemma for Computational Indistinguishability: Security Amplification for Arbitrarily Weak PRGs with Optimal Stretch
Theory of Cryptography — TCC 2010, LNCS, vol. 5978, pp. 237–254, Mar 2010.
Anja Lehmann and Stefano Tessaro
A Modular Design for Hash Functions: Towards Making the Mix-Compress-Mix Approach Practical
Advances in Cryptology — ASIACRYPT 2009, LNCS, vol. 5912, pp. 364–381, 2009.
Ueli Maurer and Stefano Tessaro
Computational Indistinguishability Amplification: Tight Product Theorems for System Composition
Advances in Cryptology — CRYPTO 2009, LNCS, vol. 5677, pp. 350–368, Sep 2009.
Robert Koenig, Ueli Maurer, and Stefano Tessaro
Abstract Storage Devices
Theory and Practice of Computer Science — SOFSEM 2009, LNCS, vol. 5404, pp. 341–352, Feb 2009.
Full version available at http://www.arxiv.org/abs/0706.2746.
Ueli Maurer and Stefano Tessaro
Basing PRFs on Constant-Query Weak PRFs: Minimizing Assumptions for Efficient Symmetric Cryptography
Advances in Cryptology — ASIACRYPT 2008, LNCS, vol. 5350, pp. 161–178, 2008.
Ueli Maurer and Stefano Tessaro
Domain Extension of Public Random Functions: Beyond the Birthday Barrier
Advances in Cryptology — CRYPTO 2007, LNCS, vol. 4622, pp. 187–204, Sep 2007.
Full version available from http://eprint.iacr.org/2007/229.
Christian Cachin and Stefano Tessaro
Optimal Resilience for Erasure-Coded Byzantine Distributed Storage
Proceedings of the Int. Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks — DSN 2006, pp. 115–124, Jul 2006
Christian Cachin and Stefano Tessaro
Asynchronous Verifiable Information Dispersal
Proceedings of the 24th Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems — SRDS 2005, pp. 191–202, Nov 2005.

Manuscripts

• Petros Mol and Stefano Tessaro
  Secret-Key Authentication Beyond the Challenge-Response Paradigm: Definitional Issues and New Protocols
  Manuscript. Dec 2012.
Stefano Tessaro
Computational Indistinguishability Amplification
PhD Dissertation. ETH Zurich. Oct 2010.