Obituary - Johan Borst (1972-2000)

We have to report the sad news that Johan Borst, PhD student in our research group, died in Breda (The Netherlands) on 19 October 2000 at age 28.

Johan studied mathematis at the Eindhoven University of Technology, where he graduated in 1997 under supervision of Prof. Henk van Tilborg. His Master's thesis is a survey of public key cryptosystems using elliptic curves, an assignment of the Netherlands National Communications Security Agency, a department of the Dutch Ministry of the Exterior.

In 1997, Johan became a PhD student at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. He performed research on the design and analysis of cryptographic algorithms. He wrote papers on the analysis of IDEA and RC-5 and on implementation measures against differential power analysis. He left us a complete Phd thesis. Johan's research work was published in the proceedings of Eurocrypt, Fast Software Encryption and the Benelux Symposium of Information Theory, and in the Journal of Computer Networks and Electronics Letters.

We will remember Johan as a smart researcher and an excellent chess player. He was a man of few words, but those who got to know him valued his sense humour. Johan was always willing to help out. He refereed several papers for IACR conferences; his reports were always thorough and fair. Johan was a member of the organizing team of Eurocrypt 2000 in Bruges.

Bart Preneel, Joos Vandewalle
October 20, 2000, Leuven, Belgium

J. Borst, Public key cryptography using elliptic curves, Master's thesis, University of Technology Eindhoven, 1997.
J. Borst, L.R. Knudsen, V. Rijmen, Two attacks on reduced IDEA, Eurocrypt '97.
J. Borst, B. Preneel, J. Vandewalle, On the time-memory tradeoff between exhaustive key search and table precomputation, 19th Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux, 1998.
J. Borst, Weak keys of CRYPTON, Comment to NIST, 1998, Presented at the 2nd AES conference, 1999.
J. Borst, B. Preneel, J. Vandewalle, Linear cryptanalysis of RC5 and RC6, FSE '99.
J. Borst, B. Preneel, J. Vandewalle, An adaptive chosen ciphertext attack on a variation of the Cramer-Shoup public-key encryption scheme, Electronics Letters, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2000.
J. Borst, B. Preneel, J. Vandewalle, Power analysis: methods and countermeasures, 21st Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux, 2000.
J. Borst, B. Preneel, V. Rijmen, Cryptography on smart cards, Journal of Computer Networks, 2001.