Prof. Aggelos Kiayias

Research & Academic Activities

Research papers: DBLP, Scholar

Teaching: Introduction to Modern Cryptography, Blockchains and Distributed Ledgers

Projects: Blockchain Technology Laboratory, Panoramix, Fentec,

Links: Blog, Security & Privacy at Edinburgh.

Websites: Blockchain Foundations, IOHK Research

Biography

Aggelos Kiayias FRSE is chair in Cyber Security and Privacy and director of the Blockchain Technology Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh. He is also the Chief Scientist at blockchain technology company Input Output. His research interests are in computer security, privacy, applied cryptography and foundations of cryptography with a particular emphasis in blockchain technologies and distributed systems, e-voting and secure multiparty protocols as well as privacy and identity management.

His research has been funded by the Horizon 2020 programme (EU), the European Research Council (EU), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UK), the Secretariat of Research and Technology (Greece), the National Science Foundation (USA), the Department of Homeland Security (USA), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (USA). He has received an ERC Starting Grant, a Marie Curie fellowship, an NSF Career Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship. He holds a Ph.D. from the City University of New York and he is a graduate of the Mathematics department of the University of Athens.

He has over 200 publications in journals, book chapters and conference proceedings in the area. He has served as the program chair of the Cryptographers' Track of the RSA conference in 2011 and the Financial Cryptography and Data Security conference in 2017, as well as the general chair of Eurocrypt 2013. He also served as the program chair of Real World Crypto Symposium 2020 and the Public-Key Cryptography Conference 2020. In 2021 he was elected fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2024 he received the BCS Lovelace Medal.

PhD Supervision

1. Yu Shen, expected graduation: 2025
2. Amirreza Sarencheh, expected graduation: 2025.
3. Christina Ovezik, expected graduation: 2026.
4. Orfeas Litos (graduated 2021). Reclaiming scalability and privacy in the decentralized setting. Now post-doctoral researcher at Imperial College.
5. Dimitris Karakostas (graduated 2021). Digital asset management via distributed ledgers. Now post-doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh.
6. Hendrik Waldner (graduated 2021). Functional encryption: definitional foundations and multiparty transformations. Now cryptography researcher at Nethermind.
7. Thomas Kerber (graduated 2021). Foundations of decentralised privacy. Now technical architect at Input Output.
8. Aikaterini-Panagiota Stouka (graduated 2021). Incentives in blockchain protocols. Now cryptography and blockchain researcher at Nethermind.
9. Giorgos Panagiotakos (graduated 2020) Ph.D. Thesis: On the Foundations of Proof-of-Work Based Blockchain Protocols. Now research fellow at Input Output.
10. Katerina Samari (graduated 2020, U. of Athens) Ph.D. Thesis: Watermarking Public-Key Functions. Now cryptography and security researcher at Ubitech.
11. Dionysis Zindros (graduated 2020, U. of Athens) Ph.D. Thesis: Decentralised Blockchain Interoperability. Now post-doctoral researcher at Stanford University.
12. Yiannis Tselekounis (graduated 2019). Ph.D. Thesis: Cryptographic Techniques for Hardware Security. Now lecturer (assistant professor) at Royal Holloway University London.
13. Thomas Zacharias (graduated 2016, U. of Athens), Ph.D. Thesis: The DEMOS family of E-voting systems. Now lecturer (assistant professor) at University of Glasgow.
14. Qiang Tang (graduated 2015, U. of Connecticut), Ph.D. Thesis: New Cryptographic Mechanisms for Enforcing Accountability. Now associate professor at University of Sydney.
15. Murat Osmanoglu (graduated 2015 U. of Connecticut), Ph.D. Thesis: Graded cryptographic primitives. Now security consultant, Istanbul, Turkey.
16. Tamas Lengyel, (graduated 2015, U. of Connecticut), Ph.D. Thesis: Malware Collection and Analysis via Hardware Virtualization. Now security researcher at Novetta. USA.
17. Sotiris Kentros (graduated 2013, U. of Connecticut), Ph.D. Thesis: The At-Most-Once Problem: Definitions, Solutions and Impossibility Results, now Associate Professor, Salem State University, Massachusetts, USA.
18. Hong-Sheng Zhou (graduated 2010, U. of Connecticut) Ph.D. Thesis: Privacy Primitives over the Internet: Designing for Composability. now Associate Professor, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia, USA.
19. Narasimha Sashidar (graduated 2010, U. of Connecticut), Ph.D. Thesis: Randomness Efficient Steganography (co-advised with Alexander Russell). now Associate Professor, Sam Houston State University, Texas, USA.
20. Serdar Pehlivanoglou (graduated 2009, U. of Connecticut) Ph.D. Thesis: Encryption Systems for Digital Content Distribution. Now VP of Engineering, Weave.