Red Pine on Wilderness Trail

Douglas Stebila

Research

My research interests include:

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

Publications

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

Post-quantum TLS without handshake signatures

P. Schwabe, D. Stebila, T. Wiggers. In ACM CCS 2020.

Towards post-quantum security for Signal's X3DH handshake

J. Brendel, M. Fischlin, F. Günther, C. Janson, D. Stebila. In SAC 2020.

Efficient oblivious database joins

S. Krastnikov, F. Kerschbaum, D. Stebila. In Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 2020.

A cryptographic analysis of the TLS 1.3 handshake protocol

B. Dowling, M. Fischlin, F. Günther, D. Stebila. In Journal of Cryptology, 2021.

Presentations

You can download slides from my presentations.

Software

I am co-founder of the Open Quantum Safe project. Check out our code on Github.

Editorial boards

I am on the editorial board of:

Designs, Codes and Cryptography

Conferences

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

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)

Graduate Students

Please see my supervision page for information about current and past graduate students, as well as about working with me.

Research Experience

2018-present: Associate Professor in the Department of Combinatorics & Optimization in the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo
2016-2018: Assistant Professor in the Department of Computing and Software in the Faculty of Engineering at McMaster University
2013-2016: Senior Lecturer in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the School of Mathematical Sciences in the Science and Engineering Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology
2010-2013: Lecturer in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the School of Mathematical Sciences in the Science and Engineering Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology
2009-2010: Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Information Security Institute at the Queensland University of Technology
- Supervisor: Prof. Colin Boyd
- Topic: Cryptographic aspects of denial of service resistance
2004-2009: PhD student in the Department of Combinatorics & Optimization in the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo
- Supervisor: Prof. Michele Mosca
- Thesis: Classical authenticated key exchange and quantum cryptography
2003-2004: MSc student at the University of Oxford
- Supervisor: Prof Dominic J. A. Welsh
- Thesis: Cryptographic applications of graph theoretic constructions
Fall 2001, Spring 2002, and Spring 2003: Intern in the Next Generation Cryptography project at Sun Microsystems Laboratories
- Supervisor: Sheueling Chang Shantz, working with Vipul Gupta, Hans Eberle, and Nils Gura
- Topic: Elliptic curve cryptography. 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. Publications: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Spring 2001: Undergraduate Research Assistant (USRA) in the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research at the University of Waterloo
- Supervisor: Prof. Stefan Wolf
- Topic: Information theory