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CISPA-Faculty Prof. Dr. Cas Cremers has been awarded the Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography. Cremers receives this honor together with his collaborators Prof. Dr. David Basin (ETH Zurich), Prof. Dr. Jannik Dreier (Université de Lorraine/Loria), and Dr. Ralf Sasse (ETH Zurich) for their sustained work on the Tamarin Prover, an open-source analysis tool for cryptographic protocols. The award was presented earlier today at the 2026 Real World Cryptography Symposium in Taipei, Taiwan, where Cremers also delivered a keynote lecture on the Tamarin Prover.
A larger group of collaborators released the first version of the Tamarin Prover in 2012. Since then, the tool has been under active development, with frequent new releases. The Tamarin Prover has grown to become one of the leading open-source tools for the analysis of cryptographic protocols, being employed in both academic and industry settings. It was used, for instance, in the development of the Apple iMessage PQ3 protocol. In 2015, the Tamarin Prover was instrumental in discovering and closing a security gap in a draft for TLS 1.3, which is the cryptographic protocol underpinning all secure Internet connections using HTTPS.
The Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography is one of the most prestigious international awards in cryptography. Established in 2016, it “honors major innovations in cryptography that have had a significant impact on the practice of cryptography and its use in real-world systems” (https://rwc.iacr.org/LevchinPrize/). Two awards are bestowed every year, each including a prize trophy designed by Ryan Rivas as well as a cash prize of USD 10,000. Previous recipients of the award include, for instance, Adi Shamir in 2025 and the Tor Project in 2021.
Professor Dr. Cas Cremers is a tenured Faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and professor of Computer Science at Saarland University, Germany. In his research, Cremers focuses, among other things, on security protocols and automated verification. His work includes co-developing the Scyther tool and the Tamarin Prover for the analysis of security protocols, and working on provable foundations for secure messaging, including the first proofs of the Signal protocol. He contributed to the development of IETF's TLS 1.3 and MLS, and was a member of the DP3T team whose privacy-preserving protocols laid the foundation for the GAEN framework used in Covid proximity-tracing apps.
On receiving the Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography, Cremers says: “I am very proud to receive the Levchin Prize together with my three long-term collaborators for our work on the Tamarin Prover. We accept this extraordinary recognition today as representatives of a larger group of contributors, including Simon Meier and Benedikt Schmidt, who were instrumental in laying the foundation for the first version in 2012, and Robert Künnemann, who notably led the SAPIC extension. When we first started work on the Tamarin Prover, we could not envision how it would grow into to a tool that is now widely used in the industry. I do feel that it has helped make many digital connections and applications more private and secure. Receiving the Levchin Prize is an amazing honor and I am truly grateful.”
About the awardees:
David Basin is a full professor for Computer Science at ETH Zurich. He is Editor-in-Chief of Springer-Verlag’s book series on Information Security and Cryptography and, from 2015–2020, of ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security. He is a Fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE.
Cas Cremers is a Faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and honorary professor at Saarland University in Germany. Prior to this, he was Professor of Information Security at the University of Oxford. He contributed to IETF's TLS and MLS standards.
Jannik Dreier is an associate professor in the LORIA lab at Université de Lorraine, where he heads the Formal Methods department. He also co-chairs the working group on formal methods for security of the CNRS IT security research network.
Ralf Sasse is a senior scientist and lecturer at the Computer Science Department at ETH Zurich. His recent work is on EMV payment security using Tamarin, and theoretical advances of tooling for security protocol analysis.
https://tamarin-prover.com The Tamarin Prover is open-source and available online.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-90936-8 Cremers, Basin, Dreier, and Sasse also co-authored a monograph on the Tamarin Prover, Modeling and Analyzing Security Protocols with Tamarin: A Comprehensive Guide, published by Springer Nature in 2025.
Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography for Jannik Dreier, Cas Cremers, David Basin, and Ralf Sass ...
Copyright: CISPA
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