Nicholas Brandt

I am a PhD student in the group of Dennis Hofheinz at ETH Zurich. My research interests range from complexity theory to cryptography, recently focusing also on applied cryptography.

Publications

Nicholas Brandt. Constrained Verifiable Random Functions Without Obfuscation and Friends. TCC 2025. Full version
Nicholas Brandt. Lower Bounds for Levin–Kolmogorov Complexity. TCC 2024. Full version
Nicholas Brandt, Sven Maier, Tobias Müller, Jörn Müller-Quade. On the Correlation Complexity of MPC with Cheater Identification. Financial Crypto 2023. Full version
Nicholas Brandt, Dennis Hofheinz, Julia Kastner, Akin Ünal. The Price of Verifiability: Lower Bounds for Verifiable Random Functions. TCC 2022. Full version

A full list of publications can be found at dblp and orcid.

Software Projects

Graph Elements: A VSCode extension for visualizing and manipulating graphs.
Texman: Runs a VSCode in a TexLive container on alpine linux.

Math Problems

Let \(\gamma : \mathbb{N} \to [0,1]\) and let \(\sigma(\kappa) \coloneqq \sum_{j=1}^\kappa \gamma(j)\). Prove that \(\sum_{j=1}^n \gamma(j) \sum_{\kappa=1}^j \frac{2^\kappa}{e^{\sigma(j) - \sigma(j-k)}} \leq_{\mathsf{io}} \frac{2^n}{n\ln(n)}\).