Gaven Watson

Sr. Staff Research Scientist

Focus Areas:  Cryptography, Security, and Privacy

Gaven Watson, Visa Research Team

Biography

Dr. Gaven Watson joined Visa Research as a Sr. Staff Research Scientist in November 2018. Gaven received his PhD and M.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of London in 2010 and 2006, respectively, and received his B.Sc. in Mathematics from Heriot-Watt University in 2005. Prior to joining Visa, Gaven was a Solutions Architect and Product Manager at Cryptomathic, working on HSM-backed solutions for areas including key management, PIN management and EMV authorization. Before working at Cryptomathic, he was a postdoc at the University of Calgary with Professor Rei Safavi, and at the University of Bristol with Professor Nigel Smart.

As a member of the advanced-cryptography team, his research interests are in practice-oriented provable security with particular focus towards authenticated encryption, key exchange and secure payments. He has published papers in several international conferences, Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS), Eurocrypt, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P) and others. 

Publications

  • Lee, M. F., Smart, N. P., Warinschi, B., & Watson, G. J. (2014). Anonymity Guarantees of the UMTS/LTE Authentication and Connection Protocol. International Journal of Information Security, 13(6), 513-527.
  • Brzuska, C., Smart, N. P., Warinschi, B. & Watson, G. J. (2013). An Analysis of the EMV Channel Establishment Protocol. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 373-386.
  • Bond, M., French, G., Smart, N. P., & Watson, G. J. (2013). The Low-Call Diet: Authenticated Encryption for Call Counting HSM Users. Topics in Cryptology–CT-RSA, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 7779, 359–374.
  • Watson, G. J., Safavi-Naini, R., Alimomeni, M., Locasto, M. E., & Narayan, S. (2012). LoSt: Location Based Storage. ACM Workshop on Cloud Computing Security Workshop, 59-70.
  • Paterson, K. G., & Watson, G. J. (2012). Authenticated-Encryption with Padding: A Formal Security Treatment. Cryptography and Security: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6805, 83–107.
  • Degabriele, J. P., Paterson, K., & Watson, G. (2011). Provable Security in the Real World. IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine, 9(3), 33–41.
  • Albrecht, M., Farshim, P., Paterson, K., & Watson, G. (2011). On Cipher-Dependent Related-Key Attacks in the Ideal-Cipher Model. FSE, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6733, 128–145.
  • Paterson, K. G., & Watson, G. J. (2010). Plaintext-Dependent Decryption: A Formal Security Treatment of SSH-CTR. Eurocrypt, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6110, 345–361.
  • Albrecht, M. R., Paterson, K. G., & Watson, G. J. (2009). Plaintext Recovery Attacks against SSH. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
  • Paterson, K. G., & Watson, G. J. (2008). Immunising CBC Mode Against Padding Oracle Attacks: A Formal Security Treatment. SCN, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5229, 340–357.   

Pending Patent

  • Agrawal, S., Bannikov, D., Luykx, A., Mohassel, P., Smirnoff, S., Vasudevan, S., & Watson, G. J. (2016). AES-Based Cryptogram Amplification. U.S. Patent No. 16,583,634. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.