I am already very excited to spend the next semester at the Saarland University CS grad school. To find new friends as well as enhance collaboration in cryptography research and development in the area I had the idea of founding a Meetup group in Saarbrücken.

In this group all enthusiasts for cryptography and security are welcome. We will discuss recent achievements in cryptography and related areas such as secure systems, implementation, offensive security, theory of computation, and hardware security in weekly meetings. Every meeting has a designated topic and a member will hold a casual presentation on this topic leading to a onward discussion with accompanied dinner. In the course of the evening, different topics may also be discussed with the present members. As the blood alcohol level raises, the discussion will become more and more informal ;)

For our first meetup I proposed the following topics:

• BlindBox: How Network Middleboxes like Firewalls and IDS can deal with encrypted traffic without having the secret key
• SEEED: How SAP can still crunch data when it is encrypted by the customer
• Zero Knowledge Proof: An Overview, zk-SNARKS and how to use them to make Bitcoin really privacy preserving
• Bitcoin: An Introduction
• Secure Multiparty Computation: An Introduction
• BigInteger Libraries: An Overview of available libraries, their design, and how I try to speed up modular multiplication

If you live in the area, please join the meetup group and help to find a time and place for our first meetup!