BIO

I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Security of Advanced Systems research group at the University of Sheffield, UK. I am broadly interested in constructing cryptographic schemes in post-quantum and quantum settings and the intersections with other disciplines, e.g., zero-knowledge proofs, cryptocurrencies, and concurrent systems.

From Nov. 2020 to April 2023, I was a postdoctoral researcher in Cryptography at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP), Bochum, Germany, where I was working with Giulio Malavolta. Prior to joining MPI-SP, I was a senior researcher in Cryptography at the University of Tartu (from August to December 2020). I finished my Ph.D. at the University of Tartu in September 2020, under the supervision of Helger Lipmaa. 

Research visit: In August and November 2019, I visited the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, Vienna, Austria, hosted by Daniel Slamanig. In October 2022, I visited the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, hosted by Dominique Schröder. 

Research Group:

PhD Students: Jiaqi Gu,  Nahid Roustaeifar 

Teaching:

I am currently teaching (taught) the following courses:

• 2025: Introduction to Cryptography

• 2024: Computer Security and Forensics

Publications:

Preprints:

• A Generic Framework for Practical Lattice-Based Non-interactive Publicly Verifiable Secret Sharing
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, John Clark, Mohammad Foroutani, Shahram Khazaei, Sajjad Nasirzadeh
  Cryptology ePrint Archive. [DOI] [URL]

• Attribute-Based Threshold Issuance Anonymous Counting Tokens and Its Application to Sybil-Resistant Self-Sovereign Identity
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, Antonis Michalas, Reyhaneh Rabaninejad, Sebastian Ramacher, Daniel Slamanig
  Cryptology ePrint Archive. [DOI] [URL]
  
  

Conferences & Journal:

• Post-Quantum Access Control with Application to Secure Data Retrieval
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, Hannes Blümel, Giacomo Fenzi, Homa Khajeh, Stefan Köpsell, Maryam Zarezadeh
  In IACR CiC 2025. [DOI] [URL]

• Universally Composable and Round-Optimal Password-Hardened Encryption
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, Ruben Baecker, Paul Gerhart, Mike Graf, Mojtaba Khalili, Daniel Rausch,
  Fritz Schmidt, Dominique Schröde
  In IACR ASIACRYPT 2025. [DOI] [URL]

• PGUS: Pretty Good User Security with a Novel Sanitizable Blind Signature
  Yang Yang, Quan Shi, Prosanta Gope, Behzad Abdolmaleki, Biplab Sikdar
  In IEEE S&P Oakland 2025. [DOI] [URL]

• On Quantum Simulation-Soundness
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, Céline Chevalier, Ehsan Ebrahimi, Giulio Malavolta, Quoc-Huy Vu
  In IACR CiC 2024. [DOI] [URL]

• Shuffle Arguments Based on Subset-Checking

Behzad Abdolmaleki, Prastudy Fauzi, Toomas Krips, Janno Siim
In SCN 2024. [DOI] [URL]

• Strong Privacy-Preserving Universally Composable AKA Protocol with Seamless Handover

Rabiah Alnashwan,Yang Yang,Yilu Dong,Prosanta Gope, Behzad Abdolmaleki, Syed Rafiul Hussain.
In ACM CCS 2024. [DOI] [URL]

• Universally Composable NIZKs: Circuit-Succinct, Non-Malleable and CRS-Updatable
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, Noemi Glaeser, Sebastian Ramacher, Daniel Slamanig.
  In IEEE CSF 2024. [DOI] [URL]

• Two-Round (Quantum) Concurrent 2PC from Sub-Exponential LWE
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, Saikrishna Badrinarayanan, Rex Fernando, Giulio Malavolta, Ahmadreza Rahimi, Amit Sahai.
  In IACR ASIACRYPT 2023. [DOI] [URL]

• stoRNA: Stateless Transparent Proofs of Storage-Time
  Reyhaneh Rabaninejad, Behzad Abdolmaleki, Giulio Malavolta, Antonis Michalas, Amir Nabizadeh.
  In ESORICS 2023. [DOI] [URL]

• CRS-Updatable Asymmetric Quasi-Adaptive NIZK Arguments
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, Daniel Slamanig
  In INDOCRYPT 2022. [DOI] [URL]  

• Steganography-Free Zero-Knowledge.
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, Nils Fleischhacker, Vipul Goyal, Abhishek Jain, Giulio Malavolta.
  In IACR TCC 2022. [DOI] [URL]

• Smooth Zero-Knowledge Hash Functions.
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, Hamidreza Khoshakhlagh, Helger Lipmaa.
  In INDOCRYPT 2021. [DOI] [URL]

• Subversion-Resistant Quasi-Adaptive NIZK and Applications to Modular zk-SNARKs.
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, Daniel Slamanig
  In CANS 2021. [DOI] [URL]  (Best Paper Award)

• On Subversion-Resistant SNARKs .
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, Helger Lipmaa, Janno Siim, Michal Zajac
  In Journal of Cryptology 2021. [DOI] [URL]

• Updatable Trapdoor SPHFs: Modular Construction of Updatable Zero-Knowledge Arguments and More
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, Daniel Slamanig
  In ACISP 2021. [DOI] [URL]

• On Succinct Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge Protocols Under Weaker Trust Assumptions
  Behzad Abdolmaleki
  PhD thesis, September, 2020. [DOI] [URL]

• Lift-and-Shift: Obtaining Simulation Extractable Subversion and Updatable SNARKs Generically
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, Sebastian Ramacher, Daniel Slamanig
  In ACM CCS 2020. [DOI] [URL]

• On QA-NIZK in the BPK Model
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, Helger Lipmaa, Janno Siim, Michał Zając
  In IACR PKC 2020. [DOI] [URL]

• SoK: Lifting Transformations for Simulation Extractable Subversion and Updatable SNARKs
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, Sebastian Ramacher, Daniel Slamanig
  In the 3rd ZKProof Workshop, 2020. [DOI] [URL]

• A Framework for UC-Secure Commitments from Publicly Computable Smooth Projective Hashing
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, Hamidreza Khoshakhlagh, Daniel Slamanig
  In IMA Cryptography and Coding 2019. [DOI] [URL]

• UC-Secure CRS Generation for SNARKs
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, Karim Baghery, Helger Lipmaa, Janno Siim, Michal Zajac
  In AFRICACRYPT 2019. [DOI] [URL]

• DL-Extractable UC-Commitment Schemes.
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, Karim Baghery, Helger Lipmaa, Janno Siim and Michal Zajac
  In Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS) 2019. [DOI] [URL]

• Breaking anonymity of some recent lightweight RFID authentication protocols.
  Karim Baghery, Behzad Abdolmaleki, Shahram Khazaei and Mohammad Reza Aref
  In Journal of Wireless Networks, Springer 2018. [DOI] [URL]

• A Subversion-Resistant SNARK
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, Karim Baghery, Helger Lipmaa and Michał Zając
  In IACR ASIACRYPT 2017. [DOI] [URL]  (One of the three Best Papers).

• Game-Based Privacy Analysis of RFID Security Schemes for Confident Authentication in IoT.
  Behzad Abdolmaleki, Karim Baghery, Shahram Khazaei and Mohammad Reza Aref.
  In Journal of Wireless Personal Communications, Springer 2017. [DOI] [URL]
  ...
  
  - See the Full List Of My Publications In My Google Scholar.

Academic Services

I am serving/served as a PC member in the following conferences:

• 2025: IACR CiC, PrivCrypt 

• 2024: ISDIA

• 2023: ASIACRYPT