Research

My research interests include:

• Applied cryptography: provable security; key exchange; digital signatures; public key encryption; client puzzles / proofs of work; elliptic curve cryptography; quantum cryptography
• Internet security: network security protocols (SSL/TLS, SSH, Tor); privacy; PKI; authentication; usability

Publications

My full list of publications is available here. My most recent papers are:

Presentations

You can download slides from my presentations.

Conferences

I am on / have been on the following program committees:

• ACM CCS 2018 — tutorials co-chair
• PQCrypto 2018
• CT-RSA 2018
• ACM CCS 2017
• Privacy, Security, and Trust 2017
• CRYPTO 2017
• Financial Crypto 2017
• ACM CCS 2016
• BalkanCryptSec 2016
• ACNS 2016
• ASIACCS-SCC 2016
• TLS 1.3: Ready or not?
• ACM CCS 2015
• ACISP 2015 — program committee co-chair
• EUROCRYPT 2015
• ASIACCS-SCC 2015
• PQCrypto 2014
• LATINCRYPT 2014
• ACISP 2014
• Usable Security (USEC) 2014
• ACISP 2013
• Usable Security (USEC) 2013
• CT-RSA 2013
• CANS 2012
• Usable Security (USEC) 2012

Grants

My major grants include:

• Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Accelerator Supplement grant 2016 – Quantum-safe cryptography for the Internet ($120,000, 2016–2019)
• Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery grant 2016 — Quantum-safe cryptography for the Internet ($215,000, 2016–2021)
• Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project 2013 — Internet authentication protocols: theory and practice ($315,000, 2013–2015; with Colin Boyd and Kenny Paterson)

PhD Students

I am supervising the following PhD students:

• Udyani Herath
• Moe Sabry

I have supervised the following PhD students:

• Ben Dowling (PhD 2017) – Provable security of Internet protocols
• Janaka Alawatugoda (PhD 2015) – On the leakage resilience of secure channel establishment
• Lakshmi Devi Kuppusamy (PhD 2012) – Modelling client puzzles and denial-of-service resistant protocols
• Reza Hassanzadeh (PhD 2014) (associate supervisor) – Anomaly detection in online social networks: using data-mining techniques and fuzzy logic
• Jothi Ramalingam Rangsamy (PhD 2012) (associate supervisor) – Cryptographic techniques for managing computational effort

Interested students should check out my supervision page.

Research Experience

I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computing and Software in the Faculty of Engineering at McMaster University.

From 2010–2016, I was a Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology in the Science and Engineering Faculty, jointly appointed between the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the School of Mathematical Sciences.

From 2009–2010, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Information Security Institute at the Queensland University of Technology, addressing cryptographic aspects of denial of service resistance.

From 2004–2009, I was a PhD student in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo. I worked with Prof. Michele Mosca on a variety of problems related to quantum cryptography, including an analysis of the cryptographic case for quantum key distribution and the development of quantum coins, a new form of digital cash that makes use of the no-cloning properties of quantum money.

As a PhD student, I was also affiliated with the Institute for Quantum Computing and the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research at the University of Waterloo. My research included analyzing side-channel attacks on elliptic curve cryptography, password authenticated key exchange protocols, and denial of service resistance of key exchange protocols.

In Fall 2001, Spring 2002, and Spring 2003, I was an intern at Sun Microsystems Laboratories in the Next Generation Cryptography project, working with Sheueling Chang Shantz, Vipul Gupta, Hans Eberle, and Nils Gura. Our research focused on next generation cryptographic technologies. I worked on software implementations of elliptic curve cryptography and the ECDH and ECDSA algorithms, and integrated them into the widely used OpenSSL and NSS toolkits. We have had several publications (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and a technical standard result from our work. I was a visiting researcher again at Sun Labs in Fall 2005.

In 2001, I was an undergraduate research assistant in the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research at the University of Waterloo. I worked with Prof. Stefan Wolf on problems in information theory.