Among top scientists and technicians of the DPRK in 2020 was Kim Kwang Ho, section chief of the Mathematics Institute of the State Academy of Sciences.

The 40-year-old solved several difficult problems in the field of computational algebraic geometry for the first time in the world. He contributed over 20 research papers to international scientific journals and collections of papers of international conferences.

The research finding on speeding up arithmetic on elliptic curves he published in 2007 has been posted on the website, which is dedicated to the world record of fastest public-key cryptography operation on elliptic curves, as the top record in the relevant field since 2008.

In particular, the technique of speeding up public-key cryptography on elliptic curves presented in September 2017 was highly appreciated at the plenary session of CHES (Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems) 2017 workshop. This annual international cryptography workshop is the flagship event in the area of information security. At the session breaking news of research findings of that year on September 26 2017, Mike Hamburg, a cryptographer, gave a detailed presentation that the technique in the paper presented by the DPRK cryptographers to CHES 2017 workshop surpassed all preceding techniques and offered to apply the technique to world internet security standard TLS 1.3.

And Kim’s paper “Speeding up elliptic curve scalar multiplication without precomputation” contributed in 2019 was appreciated as one of the best papers accepted in the international scientific journal Advances in Mathematics of Communications (AMC), which is published by the American Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), for the year 2019-2020.

Prof Sihem Mesnager who is a co-editor-in-chief of the AMC journal said that expert referees emphasized the paper highly contributed to the advances in mathematics for cryptography and expressed her thanks for his nice and strong contribution and her congratulations as well.

Kim Kwang Ho was confirmed as a member of the Program Committee of the Ninth International Workshop on the Arithmetic of Finite Fields (WAIFI) to be held in 2022. And earlier, he was invited to give a talk in a special session in Mathematics for Information Theory and Communications at the international conference AIMS 2020 on applied mathematics.

He was invited for presentation by the organizing committees of international conferences held respectively in India, Japan and the Philippines in 2014, 2015 and 2018 and presented papers to the collections of papers of the relevant conferences.

The research results he presented were quoted and described as “Kim-Kim formula for point doubling”, “Kim et al. formulas” and “Kim and Negre coordinates” in more than 380 collections of papers of international conferences, international scientific journals, research reports, websites and theses.

They contributed to raising the qualitative level of information security in different economic sectors.

Especially, he developed new elliptic curve public-key cryptographic arithmetic engine, which updated the world record over five times, and solved the problem of solving elliptic curve public-key codes in a common smart card within a second for the first time in the world in 2007.

Kim Kwang Ho who obtained a doctorate at the age of 26 conducts scientific research to push back the frontiers of computational algebraic geometry.