Awards
This page gathers together awards and prizes of members of the Applied Cryptography Group since its foundation in April 2019.
- For their work on "Probabilistic Data Structures in the Wild: A Security Analysis of Redis" Mia Filić, Jonas Hofmann, Sam Markelon (University of Florida), Kenny Paterson and Anu Unnikrishnan won a best paper award at external page ACM CODASPY 2025.
- The paper "MEGA – Malleable Encryption Gone Awry” received a external page distinguished paper award at the 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy for the work of Matilda Backendal, former ETH Master student and current UCSD PhD student Miro Haller, and Kenny Paterson. In this paper the team took a close look at security in the MEGA system, one of the largest consumer-facing cloud storage systems with more than 250 million users and more than 1000 Petabytes of stored data. The team uncovered five significant cryptographic vulnerabilities in the MEGA system.
- The paper "Post-Quantum Anonymity of Kyber" by group member Varun Maram and collaborator Keita Xagawa from NTT Social Informatics Laboratories, Japan, received the external page best paper award at the PKC 2023 conference. In this work, Varun and Keita provide concrete proofs of (tight) IND-CCA security and anonymity of the new NIST PQC standard Kyber in a post-quantum setting, thereby resolving issues identified by prior works.
- Kenny Paterson, former Applied Crypto group member Igors Stepanovs and collaborators Martin Albrecht and Lenka Mareková from Royal Holloway, University of London, won a external page distinguished paper award at the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy 2022 analysing the Telegram secure messaging system.
- Kenny Paterson and Francesca Falzon, a former visitor of the Applied Crypto group and current PhD student at the University of Chicago, won a external page best student paper award at ESORICS 2022 for their joint work. The paper presents the first leakage abuse attack against a scheme that supports private shortest path queries on graphs, and it achieves this by extending a classical algorithm for the tree isomorphism problem.
- For their work on the security of OpenPGP Kenny Paterson, Lara Bruseghini, ETH Zurich & Proton AG, and Daniel Huigens, Proton AG, won a external page distinguished paper award at ACM CCS 2022.
- Kenny Paterson won the ETH Golden Owl best teaching award for the Department of Computer Science in 2022.
- Dr. Felix Günther received several awards for his Ph.D. thesis "Modeling Advanced Security Aspects of Key Exchange and Secure Channel Protocols" and his contributions on secure communications and the key management in the widely used TLS 1.3 protocol:
- external page ACM SIGSAC 2019 Doctoral Dissertation Award for Outstanding PhD Theses in Computer and Information Security.
- external page Dr.-Heinz-Sebiger Dissertation Award 2019 on Data Protection and IT Security of the DATEV-Stiftung Zukunft foundation.
- external page ERCIM STM WG 2019 Award for the Best Ph.D. Thesis on Security and Trust Management.
- external page ACM SIGSAC 2019 Doctoral Dissertation Award for Outstanding PhD Theses in Computer and Information Security.
- Kenny Paterson, Martin Albrecht and Amit Deo won a external page best paper award at CHES 2019 for their work analysing cold-boot attacks against post-quantum encryption schemes.
- Kenny Paterson, Platon Kotzias, Abbas Razaghpanah, Johanna Amann, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez and Juan Caballero won a external page distinguished paper award at ACM IMC 2018 analysing changes in the deployment of the TLS protocol between 2012 and 2018.