Carles Padró

Associate professor at UPC
Research area: Discrete Mathematics

PhD in Mathematics obtained at UPC (1994)

Biosketch

PhD Student and Lecturer in the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, from 1988 to 1994. Doctor in Mathematics, UPC, 1994. Award to the best PhD Thesis in Mathematics conceded by UPC. Associate Professor at UPC from 1997. Senior Research Fellow at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, from September 2010 to August 2014 (on leave from the position at UPC). Advisor of 6 PhD Thesis (5 at UPC, 1 at NTU). Responsible Researcher of 4 research projects funded by the Spanish government. Member of the Editorial Board of “Designs, Codes and Cryptography.” Program Chair of the conference ICITS 2013. Participation in several Program Committees of top conferences in Cryptology. Co-organizer of several research meetings (at Lorentz Center, IPAM, CRM, UPC, etc).

My works on secret sharing, a fundamental topic in Cryptology, have reinvigorated that research area by strengthening the connections with matroid theory and information theory. The use of the right mathematical tools made it possible a more formal treatment of the topic that simplified in great measure the proof techniques. For example, this approach provided one of the main results in this line of work, namely, a thorough analysis of the limitations of the existing techniques in the search of lower bounds in secret sharing [5]. In addition, I am a co-author of the influential paper [2], in which *algebraic manipulation detection (AMD) codes* are introduced. A number of important applications of those codes in cryptology have been subsequently found.

Research lines

  • Cryptology
  • Secret Sharing
  • Information Theory
  • Code Theory
  • Combinatorics

Selected publications

  • A. Beimel, A. Ben-Efraim, C. Padró, I. Tyomkin. Multi-linear Secret-Sharing Schemes. Theory of Cryptography, TCC 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 8349 (2014) 394-418
  • R. Cramer, Y. Dodis, S. Fehr, C. Padró, D. Wichs. Detection of Algebraic Manipulation with Applications to Robust Secret Sharing and Fuzzy Extractors. Advances in Cryptology, Eurocrypt 2008, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4965 (2008) 471-488
  • O. Farràs, J. Martí-Farré, C. Padró. Ideal Multipartite Secret Sharing Schemes. Journal of Cryptology 25 (2012) 434-463
  • O. Farràs, C. Padró, C. Xing, A. Yang. Natural Generalizations of Threshold Secret Sharing. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 60 (2014) 1652-1664
  • S. Martín, C. Padró, A. Yang. Secret sharing, rank inequalities and information inequalities. Proceedings of CRYPTO 2013, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 8043 (2013) 277-288