For more information about the speakers click the link attached to each photograph.

Byron Cook is Professor of Computer Science at University College London (UCL) and Senior Principal at Amazon Web Services. Byron’s interests include computer/network security, program analysis/verification, programming languages, theorem proving, logic, hardware design, operating systems, and biological systems. Byron is the founder and leader of Amazon’s Automated Reasoning Group (ARG). Prior, he worked at Microsoft Research (joint appointment with UCL) from 2004-2014 where he founded and advanced several projects on software verification such as the Terminator project for analyzing termination behavior of industrial software. Before joining Microsoft, Byron worked at Prover Technology and Intel’s Strategic CAD Labs.
Maria Eichlseder is a postdoctoral researcher in the Cryptography group at IAIK. Her main research interests include the design and cryptanalysis of symmetric cryptographic algorithms, in particular hash functions and authenticated encryption algorithms and their underlying primitives. She co-designed Ascon, a lightweight authenticated cipher that is among the winners of the CAESAR competition. She defended her doctoral studies on the “Differential Cryptanalysis of Symmetric Primitives” in 2018, for which she received an award of excellence from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research. Before, she studied Computer Science and Technical Mathematics at Graz University of Technology.
Katharina Krombholz is currently holding a tenure track position at CISPA, Saarland. She completed her Ph.D in 2016 with distinction. She also received a master’s degree in Media Informatics from the TU Wien in 2012. During her master’s studies, she spent a semester at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. In 2013, she spent a semester as research intern at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, Japan. In 2015, Katharina spent two months as research intern at the Ruhr-University in Bochum and worked together with Thorsten Holz. Since then, she joined SBA Research as senior researcher, tought graduate courses on digital forensics at TU Wien and the University of Applied Sciences FH Campus Wien, as well as cloud security at the University of Applied Sciences FH Technikum Wien, before she joined CISPA in August 2018. Her research focuses on usable security, privacy and digital forensics.
Matteo Maffei is full professor TU Vienna where he heads the Security and Privacy group. He was previously heading the Secure and Privacy-preserving Systems Group at Saarland University.  His main research interests are the design of cryptographic solutions to protect the privacy of users in the digital world and in the development of verification techniques to enforce security and privacy properties in programs, devices, and systems. More specifically, this embraces formal analysis of security and privacy properties in distributed systems as well as formal analysis of mobile apps, program verification, security and privacy by design, privacy-enhancing technologies and privacy in cloud applications.
Elisabeth Oswald is Professor in Applied Cryptography at the University of Bristol and Professor of Cybersecurity at AAU Klagenfurt. After completing her PhD at TU Graz, she built up Bristol Cryptography’s side channel research activity. She previously was an EPSRC Leadership Fellow, and currently holds an ERC consolidator award. She was program chair of CHES and Eurocrypt, and is associate editor of the Journal of Cryptology and the Journal of Cryptographic Engineering. Her research interests are in the general area of applied cryptography and range from statistical and machine learning methods in the context of leakage analysis, over implementation techniques to leakage resilient cryptography.
Mathias Payer is a security researcher and an assistant professor at the EPFL school of computer and communication sciences (IC), leading the HexHive group. His research focuses on protecting applications in the presence of vulnerabilities, with a focus on memory corruption and type violations. He is interested in software security, system security, binary exploitation, effective mitigations, fault isolation/privilege separation, strong sanitization, and software testing (fuzzing) using a combination of binary analysis and compiler-based techniques. After 4 years at Purdue university, he joined EPFL in 2018. Before joining Purdue in 2014 he spent two years as PostDoc in Dawn Song’s BitBlaze group at UC Berkeley. He graduated from ETH Zurich with a Dr. sc. ETH in 2012, focusing on low-level binary translation and security. He analyzed different exploit techniques and wondered how we can enforce integrity for a subset of data (e.g., code pointers). All prototype implementations are open-source. In 2018, he co-founded the EPFL polygl0t CTF team and in 2014, he founded the Purdue b01lers CTF team.
Bart Preneel is a full professor at the KU Leuven, where he heads the imec-COSIC research group, which has 80 members. He has authored numerous scientific publications and is inventor of five patents. His research interests are cryptography, cybersecurity and privacy. He is president of LSEC and has been president of the IACR. He has been invited speaker at more than 120 conferences in more than 40 countries. He is a member of the Permanent Stakeholders group of ENISA (European Network and Information Security Agency) and of the Academia Europaea. He received the RSA Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics (2014), the IFIP TC11 Kristian Beckman award (2015) and the ESORICS Outstanding Research Award (2017). In 2015 he was elected as fellow of the IACR and in 2016 he delivered the IACR Distinguished Lecture. He testified in the European Parliament for the LIBE Committee Inquiry on Electronic Mass Surveillance of EU Citizens. He frequently consults for industry and government about security and privacy technologies and is involved with several start-ups in the area of cybersecurity.
Andrei Sabelfeld is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology and Gothenburg University, where he leads a team of researchers, engaged in a number of EU and national projects and collaborations with industry including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and SAP. His research focuses on web security, data and application security, language-based security, and location privacy. He serves on the steering committees of IEEE CSF, POST, and NordSec, editorial board of JCS and (about 80) program committees including IEEE Security & Privacy and ACM CCS. Also, he is recipient of the Facebook Research and Academic Relations Program Gift (2016), Google Faculty Research Award (2016), ERC Starter/Consolidator (2012), Chalmers Research Supervisor of the year (2010), and SSF Future Research Leader (2008) awards.
Peter Schwabe is an associate professor (universitair hoofddocent) for computer security in the Digital Security Group at Radboud University and member of the advisory board of Bitmark Inc. and of PQShield. Since October 2018 he is working on the project EPOQUE – Engineering post-quantum cryptography funded by the European Commission through an ERC Starting grant. He received his Ph.D. at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Coding and Cryptology Group under the supervision of Tanja Lange and Daniel J. Bernstein in 2011. After that, he worked as postdoc in the Institute of Information Science at Academia Sinica and, later on, in the Department of Electrical Engineering of National Taiwan University. Until November 2012 he was a postdoc in the Research Center for Information Technology Innovation and the Institute of Information Science of Academia Sinica.

Speakers for the lab sessions

Michael Schwarz is an Infosec PhD candidate at Graz University of Technology with a focus on microarchitectural side-channel attacks and system security. He holds two master’s degrees, one in computer science and one in software development with a strong focus on security. He frequently participates in CTFs and has also been a finalist in the European Cyber Security Challenge. He was a speaker at Black Hat Europe 2016, Black Hat Asia 2017, 2018 & 2019, and Black Hat US 2018, where he presented his research on microarchitectural side-channel attacks. He authored and co-authored several papers published at international academic conferences and journals, including USENIX Security 2016, 2018 & 2019, NDSS 2017, 2018 & 2019, CCS 2019, and IEEE S&P 2018 & 2019. He was part of one of the research teams that found the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities as well as the ZombieLoad vulnerability.
Peter Pessl is a postdoctoral researcher in the Secure Systems Group at the Institute of Applied Information Processing and Communications (IAIK) (Graz University of Technology). He finished his PhD in 2018 and received his doctorate “sub auspiciis praesidentis” (under the eyes of the Austrian President). Before starting his doctoral studies, he studied information and computer engineering. His research focuses on side-channel analysis and fault attacks on embedded systems. In particular, he analyzes the side-channel vulnerabilities of lattice-based public-key cryptography. He authored multiple papers published at venues such as CHES, Usenix, and CCS.
Robert Primas is a PhD Candidate in the Secure Systems Group at the Institute of Applied Information Processing and Communications (IAIK) (Graz University of Technology). Before starting his doctoral studies, he studied computer science in Graz. His research focuses on implementation security of embedded devices as well as symmetric cryptography. In particular, he analyses fault attacks and side-channel vulnerabilities of various cryptographic implementations. He authored multiple papers published at venues such as CHES and ASIACRYPT and is one of the designers of ISAP, a lightweight authenticated encryption scheme that is currently competing in the NIST Lightweight Cryptography competition.