ACISP 2026

Abstract: We will explore the emerging role of cryptographic thinking, modeling, and techniques in addressing core challenges in trustworthy AI, using examples from backdoors, alignment, watermarking, and applications of cryptography to non-cryptographic goals.

Bio: Vinod Vaikuntanathan is the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering in the EECS Department at MIT, a principal investigator at MIT CSAIL, and the chief cryptographer at Duality Technologies. He earned his BTech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2003, and his SM and PhD degrees from MIT in 2005 and 2009, respectively. After a postdoctoral stint at IBM Research, a year as a researcher at Microsoft, and two years as a faculty member at the University of Toronto, Vinod joined the faculty of MIT EECS in September 2013.

Vinod's research is on the foundations of cryptography and its applications to theoretical computer science at large. He is known for his work on fully homomorphic encryption, a powerful cryptographic primitive that enables complex computations on encrypted data, as well as lattice-based cryptography, which provides a new mathematical foundation for cryptography in the post-quantum world. More recently, he has been interested in the interactions of cryptography with quantum computing, as well as with statistics and machine learning.

Vinod's work has been recognized with the Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Award (2018), the Godel Prize (2022), the Simons Investigator Award (2023), the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras (2024), a Best Paper Award from CRYPTO 2024, and test-of-time awards from IEEE FOCS and CRYPTO conferences. He was also named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow in 2024 for exceptional teaching and mentoring.

Abstract: Over the past five years, public-key cryptography has witnessed rapid progress. A large number of new constructions have emerged, driven by applications such as quantum computing, blockchain systems, cloud computing, and privacy-preserving computation. While this body of work is rich and diverse, it also raises an important question: how should we understand the evolving landscape of public-key cryptography? In this talk, I take a step back to present a structured view of recent developments from 2021 to 2025, based on papers that appeared in Crypto, Eurocrypt, Asiacrypt, and PKC, with a focus on digital signatures and zero-knowledge proof systems. Building on this structure-driven survey, I will share my perspectives on research trends, novelty in research, and the principles underlying the design and understanding of public-key cryptography.

Bio: Dr. Fuchun Guo is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Information Technology at the University of Wollongong. He received his PhD from the University of Wollongong in 2013. His research interests include digital signatures and security proofs. He has published three books as a leading author, including Introduction to Security Reduction (2018), Cryptologic Research History of Digital Signatures (2022), and Introduction to Cryptographic Definitions (2025). He received the Australian Research Council's DECRA Fellowship in 2016 and Future Fellowship in 2022. More information is available at: https://www.uow.edu.au/~fuchun/ .

Abstract: The systematic testing for exploitable side-channel leakage is required for increasingly many embedded products due to the demands of certification regimes, such as PSA Certified, EUCC, and FIPS 140-3. Testing methods are either based on specific attacks or on non-specific detection tests. Both approaches come with their unique challenges and rather different cost profiles, with a seemingly unbridgeable gap between them. In this talk, I will discuss some of the methods and highlight the need for interpretability and, even more so, the need for methods that enable us to track down the root cause of information leakage.

Bio: Elisabeth Oswald is a professor at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, as well as the University of Klagenfurt in Austria. Her research focuses on constructive aspects of securely implementing cryptographic algorithms, with a focus on embedded systems. In this context, she has contributed to principled countermeasures, novel attack vectors, and methods to systematically assess information leakage.

She was an EPSRC Leadership Fellow and a recipient of an ERC Consolidator Award. She co-authored a seminal book on power analysis and has won several best paper awards.

Abstract: Modern digital ecosystems comprise billions of interconnected devices such as smartphones, IoT, and 5G systems that continuously generate sensitive data, including location, behavior, and preferences. Recent large-scale privacy incidents demonstrate that robust privacy protection is essential for security, user trust, and regulatory compliance.

This presentation introduces three of our recent research efforts towards practical privacy-enhancing systems: PriSrv+ for private wireless service discovery, AKMA+ for application authentication and key management in 5G, and keyword-based private information retrieval (PIR). For each system, we discuss the underlying problem, the proposed solution, and their real-world applications. We conclude with future research directions.

Bio: Robert Deng is Lee Kong Chian Chair Professor, Deputy Dean for Faculty & Research, School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University (SMU). His research interests are in the areas of data security and privacy, network and distributed system security, and applied cryptography. He received the Outstanding University Researcher Award from National University of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew Fellowship for Research Excellence and Zhongni Distinguished Educator Award from SMU, Asia-Pacific Information Security Leadership Achievements and Community Service Star from International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium (ISC2), and the Public Administration Medal (Silver) Singapore National Day Award. He is a Fellow of IEEE, AAIA, and Academy of Engineering Singapore.

Abstract: After two decades inside offensive security, it is worth asking whether the discipline has been moving in the direction it claims to. This talk is a practitioner's retrospective grounded in data from talkback.sh, a platform built at elttam that ingests and analyses security research, advisories, and industry commentary at scale. Using that corpus, the talk traces which work of the past twenty years meaningfully reshaped how systems are built, attacked, and defended, and contrasts it with work that captured attention without producing durable change.

The patterns suggest a field that has grown enormously in volume, funding, and visibility while struggling to convert that growth into proportional defensive outcomes. The talk examines three forces driving that drift: venture capital and the incentives of a fast-scaling commercial sector, the steady militarisation of offensive capability, and the cognitive and social dynamics that steer attention toward what is novel or marketable rather than what is useful. It closes by looking at where the data suggests research would most move outcomes next, including what the rapid maturation of offensive AI may change about the picture.

Bio: Matt Jones has spent over twenty years in cyber security, across offensive work and the engineering of security-critical systems, long enough to watch the field grow from a small technical community into a global industry. He is Director and Co-Founder of elttam, an Australian consultancy focused on deep technical assessment of complex systems, and on building research-driven tooling that supports that work. talkback.sh, the platform whose data underpins this talk, is one part of that effort.