Hi, my name is Elena Andreeva 

I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Security and Privacy Research Unit at TU Wien, Austria. Previously, I was an Assistant Prof. at DTU, Denmark and a Lecturer at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. I was also a Research Expert at COSIC, KU Leuven, Belgium. My postdoc. and doc. research was funded by grants from the Flemish Research Foundation. My PhD was supervised by prof. Bart Preneel at COSIC, Belgium. I hold a Master’s degree in CS from the University of Saarland, Germany.

My research focuses on theory and applications of cryptography related to symmetric authenticated encryption, block ciphers and forkciphers, hash functions, privacy-friendly protocols, and blockchains. I am interested in theoretical foundations and practical cryptographic algorithms for secure data communications, storage and private computation.

News

• Our Sonikku MACs demonstrate superior speed and state size compared to SotA MACs and provide beyond birthday bound security: to be presented at CANS 2025 and part of the program at ArcticCrypt 2025.

• The first and most efficient attacks on the XCBv1 and XCBv2 IEEE 1619.2 standard (as a consequence the standard was withdrawn) for encryption of sector-oriented storage media was presented to CRYPTO 2025.

• Our paper on efficient algebraic hash functions is accepted at IEEE CSF 2024. Our Poseidon-DM is up to 3× faster than Poseidon and 2× faster than Poseidon2 in native x86 execution, and up to 1.5× faster in the Groth16 framework and up to 1.9× faster in Plonky2. 

• Our new Skye KDF and its application to Signal (like) protocol(s) was presented at ACM ASIACCS 2024.

• Our new and stronger OAE-RUP notions and their application to the SAEF forkcipher-based AEAD mode was presented at SCN, 2024.

• n-to-8n-bit expanding PRF Butterknife and encryption, MAC and deterministic authenticated encryption applications of it are presented at ACNS 2024.

Professional Activities

Program committees 2025, 2024: CT-RSA 2025, CiC 2025, ACNS 2025, USENIX 2024, ASIACRYPT 2024, ToSC tool evaluation 2024, Provsec 2024, Africacrypt 2024

Cryptographic designs

• GEM: n-bit (beyond birthday bound) secure tweakable enciphering mode with efficient AES-based instances KohiNoor and DaryaiNoor. 

• Skye: efficient and secure key derivation function, well suited for Signal-style KDF applications.

• ABR tree hashing: optimally efficient collision secure tree hash function.

• Forkcipher: input expanding symmetric primitive. The ForkSkinny (n-to-2n) forkcipher in authenticated encryption modes is selected to Round 2 in the NIST lightweight AEAD competition.

• ButterKnife: n-to-8n-bit expanding function based on AES and used in SAFE and ZAFE n-bit secure and highly efficient deterministic AE.

• COLM: the development of AES-COPA AEAD and a one of the winners in the defense-in-depth category of the CAESAR AEAD competition. 

• PRIMATEs: lightweight AEAD family {APE, Hanuman, Gibbon} and selected to Round 2 in the CAESAR AEAD competition.