About me

I am a research expert at the vibrant research group COSIC, KU Leuven, Belgium. In 2013, I obtained my PhD in Information Coding at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Linköping University, Sweden. My PhD research focused on authentication, quantum key distribution, and Universal hash functions. Here is my dissertation. After a postdoctoral research on privacy-preserving biometric authentication at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, I joined COSIC in 2015.  

My focus areas include threshold cryptography and its applications in privacy-preserving collaborative authentication, frictionless authentication, and privacy-enhancing technologies for (biometric) authentication, private contact tracing, (quantum) distance bounding, secure ranging, secure multiparty computation (MPC), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), privacy-preserving machine learning. Other areas of interest include AI/ML security, anonymous solutions for distributed systems, and post-quantum security solutions.

I have 6 granted patents related to key derivation from noisy sources, such as biometrics and PUFs, useer authentication, hardware-based password protectioin, and group key exchange and ranging.

PhD Students

• Neus Vayà Vives, COSIC, KU Leuven, topic: Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning through Secure Multi-Party Computation

• Peter Schwarz, COSIC, KU Leuven, topic: Privacy-Preserving Protocols

• Varesh Mishra, COSIC, KU Leuven, topic: Secure Distributed AI at the Edge

• Kevin Bogner, COSIC, KU Leuven, topic: Quantum Distance Bounding

• Leonard Schild, COSIC, KU Leuven, topic: FHE-based Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning

• Omid Mirzamohammadi, COSIC, KU Leuven, topic: Privacy-Preserving Computations in Decentralised Identity Systems

• Martin Zbudila, COSIC, KU Leuven, topic: MPC-based Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning.

• Erik Pohle, COSIC, KU Leuven. Defended on 3 September 2025. Thesis: On Multi-Party Thresholdized Block Ciphers and Applications. 

PhD Assessor/Member of the Supervisory Committee

Current:

• Irfan Bulut, COSIC, KU Leuven, topic: Advanced Malware Detection via AI

Former:

• Seyyed Mahdi Sedaghat, COSIC, KU Leuven, topic: Distributed Consensus Protocols and Blockchain, defence on 9 July 2024.

• Akash Madhusudan, PhD Thesis: Design of Scalable and Secure Decentralized Applications, COSIC, KU Leuven, defence on 5 June 2024. 

• Alan Szepieniec, PhD Thesis: Mathematical and Provable Security Aspects of Post-Quantum Cryptography, COSIC, KU Leuven, defence on 21 December 2018. 

Editorial Board Member:

• Journal of Mathematical Cryptology

• IACR Communications in Cryptography

PC member:

• IEEE S&P 2026

• IEEE S&P 2025

• Security Standardisation Research Conference 2025

• Security Standardisation Research Conference 2024

• USENIX 2024

• USENIX 2023

• NDSS 2022 

• NDSS 2021

Journal reviews:

• IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security (TIFS)

• IEEE Communication Letters

• IEEE Systems Journal

• IEEE Access

• IET Biometrics

• Design, Codes and Cryptography

• Quantum Information & Computation 

• Quantum Information Processing

• Communications of ACM

• Computers & Security

• Journal of Information Security and Applications

• Sensors