Christof Paar
German cryptographer who made embedded security a discipline of its own and built a DES cracker out of FPGAs for a fraction of what the EFF had paid.
In 1999 Paar and Çetin Koç founded CHES, the Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems workshop, which became the home of side-channel and fault-injection research. From 2001 he held the chair for embedded security at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, which during his tenure grew into one of Europe's densest clusters of practical cryptanalysis.
In 2006 his group unveiled COPACOBANA, 120 cheap FPGAs that searched the DES keyspace in about a week for roughly $10,000. In 2008 they broke KeeLoq, the cipher in many car and garage remotes, using power analysis. His textbook Understanding Cryptography (2009, with Jan Pelzl) is widely taught. In 2019 he became a founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy.