I am associate professor in the Security and Privacy research group at the University of Edinburgh. I hold a PhD in cryptography from COSIC at the K.U. Leuven and previously was a researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge in the Programming Principles and Tools group. I worked on the Identity Mixer anonymous credential system at IBM Research Zurich and I am a founding member of the miTLS project, now project Everest, a verified implementation of the TLS standard. For the latter work I am a co-recipient of received the Levchin prize for real-world cryptography.

I am the director of the Edinburgh ZK-Lab.

I am looking for motivated PhD students with interest in cryptography, blockchain technologies, security, and/or formal verification. If you are already a student at the University of Edinburgh drop by my office to discuss.

News​

Privacy Preserving Blueprints

Privacy Preserving Blueprints qualifies/undermines law-enforcement arguments for key-escrow and client-side scanning. Published and presented at Eurocrypt 2023, available on ePrint. Stop Chat Control!

Ouroboros Crypsinous

Ouroboros Crypsinous thei first formally analysed privacy-preserving proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain protocol is now on ePrint.

State-separating proofs

Our paperState-Separating Proofs: A Reduction Methodology for Real-World Protocols (joint work with C. Brzuska, A. Delignat-Lavaud, K. Kohbrok) is available on ePrint now.

One of the goals of the paper is to reduce suffering when writing and reading real-life protocol reduction proofs, to make them readable and verifiable and also shorter and more precise. To get a good idea about the potential for simplification, look at the original proof of the miTLS, TLS 1.2 handshake, ePrint.

The navigation elements on this page and many layout elements are heavily inspired by and adapted from Mike Rouselek's homepage. The similarity between the definitional style of our paper and his textbook, The Joy of Cryptography, are, however, due to our independently formed believe that it is more accessible than what is "traditional" in crypto.

In our paper we also make the case that this style is more composeable, scaleable, and amenable to formal verification.

The updatable CRS model

Our paper Updatable and Universal Common Reference Strings with Applications to zk-SNARKs (joint work with Jens Groth, Mary Maller, Sarah Meiklejohn, Ian Miers) is available on ePrint now. The goal of the paper is to replace the zcash ceremony which is bordering on the paranoid (listen to a great radiolab episode) with publicly verifiable non-interactive CRS updates.

Teaching​

Security news

A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering by Matthew Green
Schneier on Security by Bruce Schneier

Mentoring

Personal Tutor

Research​

My research lie at the intersection of

• formal verification,
• foundations of cryptography and
• applied cryptography, especially with regard to
• privacy-enhancing protocols, blockchains, and crypto currencies and the
• formal verification of protocol implementations.

My research is supported by the IOHK and Microsoft Research.

Publications

More bibliographic information is also available on my Google scholar page and DBLP page. For most publications I include a link to a free version of the article; however, some papers are behind paywalls. Send me email if you would like a copy of paywalled publications.

Some of my key publications are:

Other Things​

Projects

Professional Service

I am the co-program chair of CANS 2024:

I have served on the following program committees (reverse chronological):

CRYPTO 2024, 2022, 2018; EUROCRYPT 2023, 2015; S&P 2022, TCC 2020, Indocrypt 2020, PKC 2019; EuroS&P 2019; CRYPTO 2018; PETS 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013; PKC 2018, 2017 ASIACCS 2017; FC 2016; CCS 2016; IMACC 2015; EUROCRYPT 2015; SOFSEM 2014; WPES 2013; ESORICS 2013, 2012; ARES 2013,2011; CT-RSA 2011; CMS 2011, 2010; COMPSAC 2009