Semester Projects
Available Projects
Students interested in a project with the group are kindly requested to send their transcript of records, along with a CV highlighting any relevant experience in cryptography, and either a preferred topic from the proposals below or a description of their interests within cryptography, to the contact noted under Student Projects.
Last updated: 17.11.2025
Ongoing Projects (Master's Level)
(We recommend students currently doing a project in our group to use this Download LaTeX template (ZIP, 230 KB) for the write-up.)
(Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson, Joint Supervisors: Laura Hetz, Dr. Lenka Mareková)
This project is continuing the group's work on developing a smartphone application to enable humanitarian workers to communicate in areas with no cellular or satellite connectivity and without extra hardware. Key open questions remain about real-world performance. Among these are battery consumption, effective range across environments, device-density thresholds for network saturation, message spread speed and delivery rates under expected usage, the impact of mobility, and the performance overhead of forthcoming security and networking improvements. The main task of this project is to extend the existing test setup and run a comprehensive experimental evaluation via manual/semi-automated lab tests on physical-device testbeds and small-scale participant experiments to measure routing/DTN behavior, connection ranges, partitioning, saturation points and failure modes to directly inform further development.
(Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson, Joint Supervisors: Kien Tuong Truong, Dr. Lenka Mareková)
This project seeks to support communication among humanitarian workers in areas with limited connectivity by developing a smartphone application that operates without additional hardware. Initially, a prototype was created using distinct Wi-Fi technologies for Android and iOS, resulting in communication barriers between these platforms. With the recent introduction of Wi-Fi Aware on iOS, prompted by the EU's Digital Markets Act, the project now aims to achieve platform interoperability by re-implementing the iOS link layer. It willinvestigate conditions for successful interoperability with Android's existing Wi-Fi Aware solution. Additionally, the project may explore improvements to the shared routing layer to bolster its resilience against frequent network disruptions, further enhancing the application's usability in diverse field settings.
(Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson, Joint Supervisors: Kien Tuong Truong, Dr. Lenka Mareková)
This project involves enhancing communication capabilities for humanitarian workers operating in areas with unreliable connectivity. Building on previous prototypes of mobile applications that utilize peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connections, the project is now focusing on integrating robust cryptographic security mechanisms. These include authentication and key exchange protocols, secure messaging protocols, and revocation mechanisms tailored to diverse field conditions and restrictions facing humanitarian workers. This means that the implementation must take into account the varied security and privacy risks as well as adapt to the unique requirements of the setting, providing multiple modes of operation that can be further configured based on local context.
Completed Projects (Master's Level)
2025
Oliver Sihlovec. Exploring Decompression Timing Side-Channels. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisors: Yuanming Song, Kien Tuong Truong.
Adam Arifi Mernissi. A Survey on Information Set Decoding. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisors: Dr. Simon-Philipp Merz, Kien Tuong Truong.
Timon Meyer. SoK: Secure Mesh Messaging in Context. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisor: Dr. Lenka Mareková.
Tony Raffoul. Practical Evaluation of Radio Standards for Mesh Networks in Humanitarian Missions. Supervisor: Prof. Christoph Studer, Co-supervisor: Dr. Stefan Mangold.
Christian Mürtz. Optimized Implementation of Poly1163 and ChaCha20-Poly1163
for x86_64 [Download pdf (PDF, 3.8 MB)]. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisor: Jan Gilcher.
Kevin Verhaeghe. Key Management Systems in the Wild: An Analysis of HashiCorp Vault. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisors: Dr. Jean-Philippe Aumasson (Taurus), Dr. Lenka Mareková.
Fiona Willi. Identifying Compiler Optimizations that Break Constant Time Programming Techniques [Download pdf (PDF, 916 KB)]. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisor: Jan Gilcher.
Daniela Thurnher. Fuzzy BFFs: Distance-Sensitive Binary Fuse Filters [Download pdf (PDF, 1005 KB)]. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisors: Laura Hetz, Dr. Francesca Falzon.
Noah Tittelbach. Breaking SSO. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisor: Matteo Scarlata.
Vaclav Zvonicek. Concrete Cost Analysis of Finding Paths in Isogeny Graphs [Download pdf (PDF, 408 KB)]. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisor: Dr. Simon-Philipp Merz.
Eduarda Assunção. Analyzing IKEv2: Security Proofs, Known Attacks, and Other Insights [Download pdf (PDF, 812 KB)]. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisor: Shannon Veitch.
2024
Marc Himmelberger. Performance Analysis of AEAD Schemes [Download pdf (PDF, 1.9 MB)]. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisor: Jan Gilcher.
Melanie Jauch. UOV and MAYO: Analysis and Comparison. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisor: Dr. Simon-Philipp Merz.
Andrea Raguso. Scalable Probabilistic Data Structures in Adversarial Environments [Download pdf (PDF, 1.8 MB)]. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisor: Mia Filić.
Domenico Nobile. Metadata-private Messaging in the Wild: Session. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisor: Dr. Lenka Mareková.
Marko Lisicic. Breaking Cryptography in the Wild: CryptPad. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisor: Dr. Zichen Gui.
Jonas Lauer. Exploring Anonymous One-to-One Messaging with a Single Server. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisors: Dr. Tianxin Tang, Laura Hetz.
Emanuel Opel. SoK: Authenticated Dictionaries and their Applications. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisor: Dr. Francesca Falzon.
Andraž Strgar. WhatsApp Multi-Device: Analysis and Noise Protocol Interceptor. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisor: Matteo Scarlata.
Junzhen Lou. Homomorphic Encryption for Healthcare Data Privacy in Industry Use Cases [Download pdf (PDF, 823 KB)]. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisors: Dr. Anwar Hithnawi (Privacy Preserving Systems Lab, ETH Zurich), Roche.
Dimitri Francolla. Privacy implications of AMQ-based PQ TLS authentication [Download pdf (PDF, 932 KB)]. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisors: Mia Filić, Shannon Veitch.
2023
Jonas Hofmann. Exploring Cuckoo filters in Redis [Download pdf (PDF, 1.9 MB)]. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisors: Dr. Anupama Unnikrishnan, Mia Filić.
Iana Peix. Repairable Threshold Schemes with Malicious Security [Download pdf (PDF, 1.1 MB)]. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisor: Shannon Veitch.
Yuanming Song. Cryptography in the Wild: Briar [Download pdf (PDF, 614 KB)]. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson.
César Descalzo. Crypto in the wild – Analysing the security of CipherStash. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisor: Dr. Zichen Gui.
Keran Kocher. Cuckoo filters in adversarial settings [Download pdf (PDF, 636 KB)]. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisor: Dr. Anupama Unnikrishnan.
Sophia Artioli. How Practical is Single-Server Private Information Retrieval? [Download pdf (PDF, 1.5 MB)] Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisor: Dr. Tianxin Tang.
2022
Daniele Coppola. Breaking Cryptography in the Wild: Nextcloud. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisors: Prof. Martin Albrecht and Matilda Backendal. [report Download pdf (PDF, 492 KB)] [paper external page pdf]
Younis Khalil. Implementing a Puncturable Key Wrapping Library [Download pdf (PDF, 1.6 MB)]. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisors: Dr. Felix Günther and Matilda Backendal.
Daniel Pöllmann. Perceptual Hash Functions. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson. Co-supervisor: Dr. Fernando Virdia.
Mirco Stäuble. Actually Good Encryption? Confusing Users by Changing Nonces [Download pdf (PDF, 1023 KB)]. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson.
2021
Theo von Arx. Analysis of Telegram Clients' Security [Download pdf (PDF, 675 KB)]. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson.
Louis Leclair. Analysing Encrypted Databases Using Learning Algorithms. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson.
Lena Csomor. Why Johnny Can’t Compute Securely: Exploring the Gap between Threat Models and Stakeholder Concerns [Download pdf (PDF, 618 KB)]. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson, Co-supervisor: Alexander Viand.
Silvia Ritsch. Analysing Privacy of Zcash PKE scheme. Joint supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson.
2020
Mathilde Aliénor Raynal. Probabilistic Data-structures in Adversarial Scenarios: The HyperLogLog Case [external page pdf]. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson.
2019
Ali El Wahsh. Compromises in Private Set Intersection for Contact Discovery. Supervisor: Prof. Kenny Paterson.