The Cryptography and AI Security Lab at Newcastle University, led by Dr Aydin Abadi, develops practical cryptographic and privacy-preserving technologies for secure AI, digital finance, blockchain systems, and trustworthy digital infrastructure.
Our research focuses on building systems that provide strong security, privacy, efficiency, and verifiability guarantees in real-world settings.
The lab's research focuses on three closely connected areas:
Privacy-preserving and secure AI
We develop cryptographic and privacy-preserving techniques for secure AI systems, including federated learning, private inference, and secure collaborative learning.
Cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies
We design and analyse cryptographic protocols and privacy-enhancing technologies, including secure multi-party computation, private set intersection, oblivious transfer, verifiable computation, time-lock puzzles, and post-quantum cryptography.
Financial technology, secure payments, and blockchain systems
We develop cryptographic technologies for secure digital payments, financial technology, and blockchain-based systems. Our work covers provably secure payment protocols, dispute resolution for fraud victims, blockchain and smart-contract security, and privacy-preserving approaches to cryptocurrency fraud and scam prevention.
The lab applies cryptography, privacy-enhancing technologies, and security analysis to the design and evaluation of practical secure systems. Its work addresses secure AI, privacy-preserving digital services, blockchain applications, financial technologies, cryptocurrency fraud mitigation, and secure payment infrastructures.
The lab's mission is to build practical, scalable, and trustworthy secure systems for the age of AI. To advance this mission, the lab works with companies, public-sector organisations, funders, and strategic partners through funded research collaborations, consultancy, technical advisory work, sponsored PhD projects, and knowledge exchange.
The lab includes doctoral researchers, affiliated members, and external collaborators working across cryptography, privacy-preserving technologies, secure AI, blockchain security, financial technology, and trustworthy digital systems.
Lab Director
Dr Aydin Abadi
Doctoral Researchers:
Hamed Alghamdi
Ishak Beno
Jakub Szelag
Affiliated Members:Â
Dr Aikaterini-Panagiota Stouka (Nethermind)
Dr Thomas Zacharias (University of Glasgow)
Dr Mohammad Naseri (Flower Labs)
Dr Ameer Mohammed (Kuwait University)
Professor Yvo Desmedt (The University of Texas at Dallas)