Welcome to CrySP!

CrySP carries out research in the areas of cryptography, security, and privacy. The members of CrySP study a wide variety of topics, from designing cryptographic protocols to the evaluation of their effectiveness and usability in deployed systems. Here are some examples....

News

• Congratulations to Professor Ian Goldberg and former doctoral students Aniket Kate and Gregory Zaverucha for receiving the 2025 ASIACRYPT Test of Time Award for their foundational work on reducing communication costs in cryptographic protocols !
• Congratulations to CrySP faculty member Meng Xu and Sihang Liu on securing $254,000 in funding from the National Cybersecurity Consortium to strengthen the security of large language model agents!
• Congratulations to CrySP student Anudeep Das, supervised by Professors Nadarajah Asokan and Florian Kerschbaum, for receiving $58,100 USD from Open Philanthropy to advance research on stealthy and resilient LLM backdoors!
• Congratulations to Professors Diogo Barradas and Urs Hengartner and collaborators for winning the Best Research Paper Award at ARES 2025 for their paper "On the Feasibility of Fingerprinting Collaborative Robot Network Traffic"
• Congratulations to Professor Diogo Barradas for receiving the 2025 FOCI Rising Star Award for his advances in censorship-resistant communications and systematization of surveillance and censorship risks!
• Congratulations to Anudeep Das, Vasisht Duddu, and Professor Nadarajah Asokan for winning the Best Paper Award at CODASPY 2025 for their work “Espresso: Robust Concept Filtering in Text-to-Image Models” !
• Congratulations to PhD student Vasisht Duddu for receiving the 2024 IBM PhD Fellowship for his research on machine-learning security!
• Congratulations to Professors Ian Goldberg, Nadarajah Asokan, Diogo Barradas, Sergey Gorbunov, Urs Hengartner, Florian Kerschbaum, Mohammad Hajiabadi, and Meng Xu for securing $1.6M from CFI and ORF for UPSCOPE , a facility enabling large-scale research on privacy, security, and cryptography!
• Congratulations to Professor Sergey Gorbunov, whose Axelar work was highlighted in Interop Labs’ US$1M donation to grow the Computer Research Endowment at the University of Waterloo to advance blockchain and AI research at Waterloo!
• Congratulations to Professor Florian Kerschbaum for receiving National Cybersecurity Consortium funding to support secure outsourcing of sensitive data and privacy-preserving genomic data processing!
• Congratulations to Professor Diogo Barradas and collaborators for receiving the 2024 Best Portuguese Internet Research Award from ISOC.pt for their work on flow-correlation attacks against Tor onion services!
• Congratulations to Qingyang Zhou and Professor Meng Xu on winning $2 million in the DARPA AIxCC Cybersecurity Challenge as part of an international team
• Congratulations to PhD student Vasisht Duddu, Intel researcher Sebastian Szyller, and Professor Nadarajah Asokan for receiving a Distinguished Paper Award at the 45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy for their work "SoK: Unintended Interactions among Machine Learning Defenses and Risks" !
• Congratulations to Professor Florian Kerschbaum for receiving a $2M Ontario Research Fund grant to enhance data security in fintech and manufacturing through privacy-preserving data analysis and secure computing!
• Congratulations to Professor Ian Goldberg on being named a 2023 ACM Fellow for his extensive contributions to privacy-enhancing technologies
!
• Congratulations to Professors Urs Hengartner, Diogo Barradas, Meng Xu, and others on being part of the Cheriton School team awarded $3.3 M in NCC funding!
• Congratulations to Fairblock, co-founded by CrySP alumnus Peyman Momeni, for securing US$2.5M in funding to bring conditional encryption and pre-execution privacy to blockchain-based decentralized applications
!
• Congratulations to Professor Nadarajah Asokan on being named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada for his influential contributions to systems security and trusted execution environments!
• Congratulations to Master's graduate Lindsey Tulloch and Professor Ian Goldberg for receiving the Andreas Pfitzmann Best Student Paper Award at PETS 2023 for their paper “Lox: Protecting the Social Graph in Bridge Distribution,” advancing censorship-resistant Tor access!
• Congratulations to Professor Ian Goldberg on being named a Senior Member of the IEEE in recognition of his career-long contributions to privacy-enhancing technologies, adding to distinctions such as the EFF Pioneer Award and the USENIX Security Test of Time Award!
• Congratulations to Axelar, co-founded by Professor Sergey Gorbunov, for raising US$35M in Series B funding and joining the ranks of blockchain unicorns!
• Congratulations to Owura, Mei, and Asokan for having their paper "Is GitHub’s Copilot as Bad as Humans at Introducing Vulnerabilities in Code?" featured in The Globe and Mail!
• Congratulations to Urs and his coauthors for having their SOUPS 2021 paper "Concerned but Ineffective: User Perceptions, Methods, and Challenges when Sanitizing Old Devices for Disposal" featured in The Record!
• Congratulations to Simeon for winning the 2021 Huawei Prize for Best Research Paper by a Mathematics Graduate Student!
• Congratulations to Sergey for raising US$3.75M for his blockchain startup Axelar!
• Congratulations to Asokan for winning best paper from IEEE Transactions on Computers for his work on FastBFT!
• Congratulations to Jiayi and Urs for having their USENIX Security 2020 paper Chaperone: Real-time Locking and Loss Prevention for Smartphones featured in The Record, The Waterloo Chronicle, Exchange Magazine, and Technology Org!
• Miti and Ian's PoPETs 2020 paper Mitigator: Privacy policy compliance using trusted hardware was featured on Engadget, ACM TechNews, and TechLinked!
• Congratulations to Ian Goldberg and his coauthors for winning the USENIX Security Test of Time Award for their 1996 paper "A Secure Environment for Untrusted Helper Applications: Confining the Wily Hacker!
• Congratulations to Ian Goldberg for being named Canada Research Chair in Privacy Enhancing Technologies!
• CrySP is actively looking for students interested in grad studies. See 'Prospective Students' on the left for details.