Our alumni
A-H
- Dr Marcel Armour
Marcel submitted his thesis titled 'Cryptographic Subversion Attacks Targeting Receivers' in October 2022 and is now with Mastercard as a Cryptography Engineer. - Dr Simon Bell
Simon’s thesis focuses on a data-driven approach to investigate phishing and malware attacks on Twitter. By collecting and analysing large-scale datasets, Simon explored how effective Twitter’s defence system is at protecting its users against these malicious attacks. Simon's thesis can be viewed here
- Dr Simon Butler
Simon's thesis explores the security concerns about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, including their use for criminal activity. Using securitisation theory, Simon examines where cryptocurrencies might fit into our future vision of money and in what way they challenge centuries of debate about this key pillar of society.
- Dr Giovanni Cherubin
Giovanni's research focused on applying results of the Machine Learning theory (e.g., classic Statistical Learning theory, conformal prediction) to provably measure security against a wide class of attacks. He also worked on improving Machine Learning-based attacks (e.g., website fingerprinting, membership inference) and proposing new defences to counter them.) Up to date info are found at: https://giocher.com.Giovanni's thesis, titled 'Black-box Security Measuring Black-box Information Leakage via Machine Learning' can be found here. - Dr Georgia Crossland
Georgia's doctoral thesis is titled 'Using Psychological Theories and Usable Security to Understand Cyber-Security Perceptions and Behaviours Within an Organisation; a Case Study of a Law Firm'. This research involved a qualitative study of human factors within an organisational context. Shortly after her viva, Georgia started working as a User Experience Researcher at Meta.
- Dr Benjamin Curtis
Ben's thesis is on Cryptanalysis and Applications of Lattice-based Encryption Schemes. The work ranges across contributions to attacking such schemes, establishing their security, and examining the not inconsiderable challenges of implementing them in practice. During his time with the CDT, Ben published four papers, two at the Workshop on Encrypted Computing and Applied Homomorphic Cryptography, a conference most closely matching some of his work, one at Selected Areas of Cryptography and one at the International Conference on Security in Communications Networks (SCN). This latter paper is the influential work on establishing an estimation of lattice security parameters, which was co-authored by a number of ISG researchers.
Ben is now a post-doc at the Alan Turning Institute.
- Dr Alex Davidson
Graduated from the University of Warwick with a BSc Mathematics degree, receiving first class honours. He was supervised by Prof Carlos Cid and conducted research into the development of cryptographic constructions. Alex's thesis, titled "Computing Functions Securely: Theory, Implementation and Cryptanalysis or, Topics in Insecurity" can be viewed here
- Dr Amit Deo
Amit's thesis is on lattice-based cryptography and contains three main contributions. First, Amit (and Dr Martin Albrecht) showed that there exist parameters for the Ring-LWE problem that are equivalent to parameters for the Module-LWE problem for any dimension d. This strengthens our confidence in Ring-LWE as a platform problem to build (post-quantum) cryptography from. This work was published at ASIACRYPT 2017. https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/612. Second, Amit (together with Prof Kenny Paterson and Dr Martin Albrecht) showed that cold boot attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_boot_attackare easier than one might expect on Module-LWE based schemes such as Kyber (and to some extend Ring-LWE based schemes such as New Hope). This is due to the secret key being stored in NTT domain on the device, giving rise to an LWE-like problem with additional algebraic structure that can be exploitable. This work won the best paper award at CHES 2018. https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/672.Third, Amit (together with Dr Alex Davidson, Nigel Smart and Dr Martin Albrecht) constructed the first (conjectured to be) post-quantum secure verifiable oblivious pseudorandom function (VOPRF). Such a function allows a client to evaluate a PRF under some server key, without the server learning the input to the PRF. Such functions are, for example, used in Privacy Pass https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-supports-privacy-pass/. While this construction is far from the efficiency of pre-quantum alternatives, it’s a first step towards preserving such functionality in a post-quantum world. This work is currently in submission. https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1271. Amit has now joined the AriC Team at ENS Lyon as a postdoc. - Dr Amy Ertan
Amy's research focused on the security of implications of artificial intelligence in military contexts. Interviewing policy and defence experts in the UK, US and at NATO, her research found the military innovation landscape is rapidly evolving to account for emerging technologies. Amy submitted her doctoral thesis in early May 2022 and is currently a Cyber Security Researcher with the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn, Estonia. Her thesis can be viewed here
- Dr Naomi Farley
Naomi is currently working as a Senior Research Scientist at Thales UK. Her thesis considered the cryptographic enforcement of (read-only) information flow policies, which model hierarchies of security labels. - Dr Ashley Fraser
Ashley completed her PhD with her thesis titled 'Advanced Privacy Notions for Electronic Voting and Digital Signatures'. Ashley is now working on a research project on self-sovereign identity as a postdoc at the University of Surrey.
- Dr Lydia Garms
Lydia submitted her thesis titled Variants of Group Signatures and Their Applications for examination in early January 2020 and is now a Researcher in Cryptography at Keyless.
- Dr Jordy Gennissen
Jordy submitted his thesis ‘On the Development of Next Generation Memory Exploits’ in December 2022
- Dr Andreas Haggman
For his thesis, Andreas developed an original educational tabletop wargame based on the UK National Cyber Security Strategy and deployed this to a range of public and private organisations in the UK and internationally to gather data on the pedagogic efficacy of the game. The findings showed that the game was a powerful tool for creating learning moments. During his PhD Andreas was also involved in many (many!) activities outside his core research, including presenting at numerous conferences and workshops, and being part of the organising team for the Cyber 9/12 UK student policymaking challenge. Andreas now works as Head of Cyber Advocacy -Skills, Innovation and Research at DCMS.
- Dr Torben Hansen
Torben's thesis concerns the security of SSH, one of the most important and commonly-used secure communications protocols. In his thesis, Torben developed clever timing attacks against the SSH protocol in the case when it uses CBC-mode for encryption (once its most popular configuration). He also presented the results of two Internet-wide surveys, carried out in 2015 and 2019, to evaluate the usage of SSH "in the wild". His thesis then provides formal security analysis, in the provable security tradition, for a range of different encryption options in SSH. Finally in this thesis, Torben showed how to streamline and then efficiently and securely implement a scheme called InterMAC in the SSH context. This scheme provides enhanced security protection compared to the currently available encryption options in SSH, particularly where traffic analysis is a concern.
Torben has recently joined the Crypto Engineering Team at Amazon Web Services.
- Dr Steve Hersee
Steven's thesis is titled "The Cyber Security Dilemma and the Securitisation of Cyberspace" - mixing up in-depth research and analysis of debates around encryption, the dark web, UK cyber security strategy and the Investigatory Powers Act, with a piece of ethnographic work during the several seasons Steve worked as a ‘hunter’ for the Channel 4 tv programme Hunted. Steve is now head of strategy for cyber security within the Cabinet Office. - Dr Rory Hopcraft
Rory submitted his thesis titled 'The Creation and Role of Maritime Cybersecurity Governance' in December 2021. His research investigates investigates and contributes to the understanding of the development of maritime cybersecurity governance. Rory is now Lecturer in Cyber Security at University of Plymouth.
- Dr Jonathan Hoyland
Jonathan's thesis, titled 'An analysis of TLS 1.3 and its use of composite protocols' provides a comprehensive and modular symbolic model of TLS 1.3 and uses the Tamain prover to verify the claimed TLS 1.3 requirements. Jonathan now works at Cloudflare. - Dr Jodie Knapp
Jodie passed her viva with her thesis ‘Extending the functionality and security of time-based primitives’ in August 2023. The overarching theme of the thesis is to explore the role of time in cryptography with an emphasis on protocol design, security modelling, and reducing assumptions of trust placed upon external entities or users. Explicitly focusing on two time-based primitives: Updatable Encryption and Secret Sharing Protocols. Jodie is now a Post-Doc Researcher at University of Surrey.
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- Dr Thalia Laing
Thalia spent her time with the CDT focusing on Secret Sharing Schemes and their application to constrained devices. Her resulting thesis, titled "Enhanced Threshold Schemes and their Applications' has led her to successfully complete the programme and gain her PhD. Thalia has now embarked on a career as Senior Researcher in the Security Lab of HP Labs.
- Dr Ela Lee
Ela's thesis, titled 'Advancements in Proxy Re-Encryption: Defining Security for wider Applications', explores formal definitions, bounds and schemes for a cryptographic primitive which essentially allows data encrypted under one key to become encrypted under another key without the protected data being revealed.
- Dr Robert Lee
Rob spent his time in the CDT researching how hardware and software can be securely bound together in computing devices. He submitted his thesis on the subject in August 2018 and is now working as a Software Engineer for GlobalSign. -
Dr Blake Loring
Blake submitted his thesis titled Practical Dynamic Symbolic Execution for JavaScript in June 2020. He is now working as a Senior Systems Engineer for Network Guard, based in Hong Kong. - Dr Lenka Marekova
Lenka’s research contributes to bridging the gap between cryptographic research and practical applications by looking for flaws in the protocols underlying real-world messaging applications.
Lenka passed her viva with her thesis 'Cryptographic Analysis of Secure Messaging Protocols' in July 2023.
- Dr Jake Massimo
Jake’s thesis is on primality testing in cryptography, in which he first provides a systematic analysis of the implementation landscape of primality testing within cryptographic libraries and mathematical software. He then demonstrates how these tests perform under adversarial conditions, where the numbers being tested are not generated randomly, but instead by a possibly malicious party. Jake then explored the implications of these security failures in applications, focusing on the construction of malicious Diffie-Hellman parameters. Finally, Jake addressed the shortcomings uncovered in primality testing under adversarial conditions by the introduction of a performant primality test that provides strong security guarantees across all use cases, while providing the simplest possible API. - Dr Liam Medley
Liam submitted his thesis titles 'A Good Use of Time: Techniques and Applications of Delay-Based Cryptography' in June 2023 and passed his viva in October the same year. Liam continues his research journey as a Post-Doc in the crypto team at Télécom Paris. - Dr Simon-Phillip Merz
Simon's thesis "A Curved Path to Post-Quantum: Cryptanalysis and Design of Isogeny-based Cryptography" looks at post-quantum cryptography, in particular on isogeny-based crypto. Simon passed his PhD in April 2023 - Dr James Patrick-Evans
James submitted his thesis titled Software Analysis Through Binary Function Identification in December 2021 and went on to found RevEng.ai - Dr Feargus Pendlebury
Feargus' thesis on Machine Learning for Security in Hostile Environments summarizes an exciting journey that introduces concept drift, a central motif throughout the work that indirectly represents the effects of the hostile environments, drawing relationships between such drift and adversarial ML attacks, carefully crafted perturbations that cause errors in learning-based approaches. - Dr Jeroen Pijnenburg
Jeroen submitted his thesis titled ‘Optimally Secure Messaging with Immediate Decryption and Storage Solutions’ and passed his viva in December 2022.
- Dr Eamonn Postlethwaite
Eamonn’s thesis is on solving hard lattice problems via lattice sieving, the fastest known family of algorithms for this task. As you may recall, hard problems on lattices are important computational problems for building cryptographic schemes that are secure against quantum computers and to achieve advanced functionalities such as computing on encrypted data. Eamonn is now doing a postdoc with Léo Ducas at CWI in Amsterdam to study the intersection of lattices and codes
- Dr Dusan Repel
Dusan passed his PhD with his thesis titled 'Techniques for the Automation of the Heap Exploit Synthesis Pipeline'. -
Dr Nicholas Robinson
Nick’s thesis Distributed Denial-of-Government: The Data Embassy and the geopolitical, diplomatic and legal implications of extraterritorial data storage was submitted in September 2020. The thesis focuses on the Estonian Data Embassy project and aims to understand what the primary motivations are behind the government’s decision to begin storing its data extraterritorially outside of its borders.
- Dr Sam Scott
Sam's work focused on real world cryptography, covering the design of new primitives for use in password storage, and formal analysis of the TLS 1.3 specification. After submitting his thesis, titled 'The design and Analysis of Real-World Cryptographic Protocols', Sam joined Cornell Tech on the Startup Postdoc programme.
- Dr Carton Shepherd
Carlton's research focused on establishing trust in constrained devices with trusted execution environments. Carlton submitted his thesis titled 'Techniques for Establishing Trust in Modern Constrained Sensing Platforms with Trusted Execution Environments' and gained his PhD in February 2019.
- Dr Laura Shipp
Laura’s research contributed to a burgeoning area of research known as femi-nist cyber security which seeks to reimagine what cyber security is and does. It brings feminist geo-political thought into conversation with the theory and practice of cyber security, using this to con-sider what feminist cyber security could look like. Laura submitted her thesis titled ‘Leaky Bodies, Leaking Data: Period Tracking Apps, Menstrual Capitalism And The Praxis Of Feminist Cyber Secu-rity’, was awarded her PhD in December 2022 and is now a research assistant at Royal Holloway
- Dr Pallavi Sivakumaran
Pallavi completed her PhD in 2021, with her thesis exploring security and privacy concerns in Bluetooth Low Energy. Pallavi is now a security researcher at WithSecure
- Dr Luke Stewart
Luke’s research explored how distinct difference configurations may be used to distribute symmetric keys in a wireless sensor network, so that data transmitted between nodes in the network may be encrypted. Luke submitted his thesis titled ‘Distinct Difference Configura-tions in Groups’ in summer 2022
- Dr Philippa Thornton
Pip came to the CDT from a professional background in the police and the military. Her thesis, titled 'Language in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction' explores the concept of linguistic capitalism arguing that the ongoing effects of digitally mediated language are both linguistic and political.Pip maintains a blog to accompany her research. Linguistic Geographies can be found here. - Dr Marcos Tileria Palacios
Marcos submitted his thesis titled ‘Security and Privacy in a World of Interconnected Devices’ in February and passed his viva in July 2023.
- Dr Thyla Van Der Merwe
Thyla was with ETH Zurich building an industry-focused research centre and is now Security Engineering Manager at Google. Whilst at Royal Holloway, Thyla's research focused on attacking TLS 1.2, as well as verifying TLS 1.3 Thyla's thesis can be accessed here. - Dr Fernando Virdia
Fernando’s thesis deals with post-quantum cryptography with an emphasis on lattices and focuses on cryptanalysis and implementation.
- Dr Conrad Williams
During his time with the CDT, Conrad successfully presented at a wide range of conferences and had several research papers published. Conrad passed his PhD with the submission of his thesis titled 'Completeness in Languages for Attribute-based Access Control', and has now joined specialist reinsurance broker Capsicum as part of their cyber team.
- Dr Joanne Woodage
Joanne's research focused on provable security, and in particular its application to real world cryptographic problems. She gained her PhD in November 2019 with the thesis, 'Provable Security in the Real World: New Attacks and Analyses' She is now working as a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge.
