News
- COSIC Researcher Wouter Legiest on the Nerdland Main Stage: Quantum Computing Meets Cybersecurity
COSIC PhD researcher Wouter Legiest took the main stage at the Nerdland Festival, the largest science festival in the Benelux, during the flagship science show “Quantum for Dummies”, in front of an audience of more than 3,400 attendees. The show, hosted by Lieven Scheire and Hetty Helsmoortel, guided a packed theatre through the fundamentals of quantum ... - COSIC Researchers Reveal Fundamental Weaknesses in Microsoft’s PhotoDNA
A team from COSIC (Maxime Deryck, UGent; Diane Leblanc-Albarel, COSIC; Bart Preneel, COSIC) has uncovered major security vulnerabilities in PhotoDNA, the technology widely used to detect Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) across the internet. Since its introduction by Microsoft in 2009, PhotoDNA has become a global standard, relied upon by platforms such as Google, Instagram, ... - Nigel Smart wins RSAC 2026 Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics
COSIC is proud to announce that Prof. Nigel Smart has been selected as one of the recipients of the RSAC 2026 Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics, one of the most prestigious recognitions in the cybersecurity and cryptography community. The award, co‑sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), honors individuals whose foundational ...
Selection of Key Publications
- S. Petkova-Nikova, S. Andreoli, P. Stănică, L. Budaghyan and E. Piccione, “On Decompositions of Permutations in Quadratic Functions“, Journal of Cryptology 38, 22 pages, 2025.
- R. Sarenche, A. Aghabagherloo, S. Petkova-Nikova and B. Preneel, “Bitcoin under Volatile Block Rewards: How Mempool Statistics Can Influence Bitcoin Mining” In Proceedings of ACM CCS 2025, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), ACM, pp. 903-917, 2025.
- S. Kundu, Q. Norga, A. Karmakar, U. Ojha, A. Ganguly and I. Verbauwhede, “mUOV: Masking the Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar Digital Signature Scheme at First- and Higher-Order” In Proceedings of ACM CCS 2025, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), ACM, pp. 1994-2008, 2025.
- G. Borin, M. Corte-Real Santos, J. Komada Eriksen, R. Invernizzi, M. Mula, S. Schaeffler and F. Vercauteren, “Qlapoti: Simple and Efficient Translation of Quaternion Ideals to Isogenies” In Advances in Cryptology – ASIACRYPT 2025, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, , 2025.
- A. Bhati and E. Andreeva, “Breaking the IEEE Encryption Standard — XCB-AES in Two Queries” In Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2025, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 16003, Y. Kalai and S. Kamara (Eds.), Springer-Verlag, pp. 172-199, 2025.
- K. Cong, E. Orsini, E. Pohle and O. Zajonc, “Row Reduction Techniques for n-Party Garbling” In Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2025, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 16003, Y. Kalai and S. Kamara (Eds.), Springer-Verlag, pp. 522-555, 2025.
- A. Robinson, S. Arpin, J. Lau, A. Mesnard, R. Perlner, J. Tillich and V. Vasseur, “Error Floor Prediction with Markov Models for QC-MDPC Codes” In Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2025, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 16003, Y. Kalai and S. Kamara (Eds.), Springer-Verlag, pp. 221-252, 2025.
- P. Dartois, J. Komada Eriksen, T. Fouotsa, A. Herledan le Merdy, R. Invernizzi, D. Robert, R. Rueger, F. Vercauteren and B. Wesolowski, “PEGASIS: Practical Effective Class Group Action using 4-Dimensional Isogenies” In Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2025, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 16003, Y. Kalai and S. Kamara (Eds.), Springer-Verlag, pp. 67-99, 2025.
- W. Castryck, T. Decru, P. Kutas, A. Laval, C. Petit and Y. Bo Ti, “KLPT²: Algebraic Pathfinding in Dimension Two and Applications” In Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2025, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 16003, Y. Kalai and S. Kamara (Eds.), Springer-Verlag, pp. 167-200, 2025.
- A. Flórez-Gutiérrez, E. Lambooij, G. Leurent, H. Raddum, T. Tiessen and M. Verbauwhede, “Cryptanalysis of Full SCARF” In Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2025, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, 30 pages, 2025.
- Y. Chen, A. Dutta, A. Jha and M. Nandi, “Towards Optimally Secure Deterministic Authenticated Encryption Schemes” In Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2025, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, 39 pages, 2025.
- R. Geelen and F. Vercauteren, “Fully Homomorphic Encryption for Cyclotomic Prime Moduli” In Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2025, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, pp. 366-397, 2025.
- M. Chen and C. Petit, “Computing the Endomorphism Ring of a Supersingular Elliptic Curve from a Full Rank Suborder” In Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2025, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, pp. 446-474, 2025.
- A. Aghabagherloo, A. Abadi, S. Sarkar, V. Asutosh Dasu and B. Preneel, “Impact of Data Duplication on Deep Neural Network-Based Image Classifiers: Robust vs. Standard Models” In 2025 DLSP – IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshop (SP), IEEE, 8 pages, 2025.
- A. Aghabagherloo, R. Sarenche, M. Zarezadeh, B. Preneel and S. Kopsell, “Priv-PFL: A Privacy-Preserving and Efficient Personalized Federated Learning Approach” In 2025 DLSP – IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshop (SP), IEEE, 6 pages, 2025.
- J. De Meulemeester, L. Wilke, D. Oswald, T. Eisenbarth, I. Verbauwhede and J. Van Bulck, “BadRAM: Practical Memory Aliasing Attacks on Trusted Execution Environments” In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2025, IEEE Computer Society, IEEE, pp. 4117-4135, 2025.
- M. Rahimi, P. Kumar and C. Diaz, “LAMP: Lightweight Approaches for Latency Minimization in Mixnets with Practical Deployment Considerations” In Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2025), Internet Society, 19 pages, 2025.
- H. Morita, E. Pohle, K. Sadakane, P. Scholl, K. Tozawa and D. Tschudi, “MAESTRO: Multi-Party AES Using Lookup Tables” In 34 USENIX Security Symposium 2025, L. Bauer and G. Pellegrino (Eds.), Usenix, pp. 1965-1984, 2025.
- W. Legiest, J. D’Anvers, B. Spasic, N. Tran and I. Verbauwhede, “Leuvenshtein: Efficient FHE-based Edit Distance Computation with Single Bootstrap per Cell” In 34 USENIX Security Symposium 2025, L. Bauer and G. Pellegrino (Eds.), Usenix, 18 pages, 2025.
- A. Sateesan, J. Vliegen and N. Mentens, “Breaking the Scalability Barrier of Content Addressable Memories: A Probabilistic Alternative for Large-Key Associative Search”, ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems , 26 pages, 2026.
- W. Hellemans, J. Hamborg, T. Lauser, M. Rabbani, B. Preneel, C. Krauß and N. Mentens, “CarDS – Controller Area Network and Automotive Ethernet Realistic Data Set” In Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), ACM, pp. 798-814, 2025
- H. Çeliker, W. Dehaene and K. Myny, “Multi-project wafers for flexible thin-film electronics by independent foundries“, Nature (629), pp. 335-340, 2024.
