Announcing The First Recipients of The Zama Cryptanalysis Grants

Last month, we launched the Zama Cryptanalysis Grant Program to support researchers aiming to break systems: through cryptanalysis, side-channel attacks, fault injection, or other inventive methods.

While many initiatives fund the design of cryptographic primitives like Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC), Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP), and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), few invest in considering real-world attacks to test the resilience of these technologies. Our goal is to fill that gap by incentivizing bold research that challenges the security assumptions behind today's leading privacy-enhancing technologies.

The program is open to academics, PhD students, independent security researchers, and industry practitioners with demonstrated expertise in cryptanalysis and security evaluation. By empowering experts to rigorously test these systems, we aim to strengthen the foundations of secure computation.

The first recipients

We’re excited to announce the recipients of the first round of grant awards, selected for their outstanding expertise and promising research proposals:

• Chris Peikert — University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), USA
• Christina Garman and Daniel Genkin — Purdue University, USA, and Georgia Tech, USA
• Martin Albrecht and Eamonn Postlethwaite — King’s College London, UK
• Nadia Henninger and Miro Haller — University of California, San Diego, USA
• Sabine Oechsner and Peter Scholl — VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Aarhus University, Denmark
• ‍Victor Lomne — NinjaLab, France

Applications are still open

The Zama Cryptanalysis Grant Program is set to become a permanent feature in our calendar, with a flexible schedule allowing projects to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. The submissions are reviewed by a committee of cryptographers, and evaluated based on their technical merit, feasibility, and potential impact.

Mindful of how limited resources often affect research and development, Zama is ready to provide concrete support to the participants in the new initiative and award grants to cover research costs for the duration of a project.

If you’re ready to challenge the state of the art of cryptographic security, we want to hear from you. Feel free to reach out to us at grants@zama.ai.

Let’s work together to build stronger, and more trustworthy systems!

‍