Congratulations on your new status as Tenured Faculty. What does reaching this career milestone mean to you?
It’s a great achievement. I’m very glad that I made it and I am happy that my research was successful and well received by the community. It feels like a natural next step, something you want to reach at some point. At the age of 37 this is actually my first permanent position, so that feels really good. The process wasn’t really a burden or a problem—I was mostly focused on doing the research. Very helpful for me was the midterm evaluation. I got clear feedback on where to improve, and I focused on that. Once I knew what to work on, it was just a matter of doing it and waiting for the results. My crypto colleagues at CISPA were also very supportive. They told me not to worry and that helped a lot.
What makes working at CISPA particularly special for you?
For me, it’s definitely the freedom. I can do whatever I want research-wise. As long as I publish top-tier papers, no one is pushing me in a particular direction. I really value that. And the people are great—the whole floor, the groups around — it’s a really good community. I’ve managed to build connections and find people I can talk to, which means a lot to me.
You work in the field of applied cryptography and cryptography for embedded devices. What were the key topics that occupied you during your tenure-track phase?
The main topics I focused on were blind signatures and FIDO authentication tokens. Blind signatures allow someone to get a signature from an authority, like a bank, without revealing the actual message. This cryptographic primitive can find applications in concrete projects like the EU digital identity wallet project, for example. The idea of the wallet is to give citizens control over their digital identity. You can choose what to disclose—for instance, just your age without your name or full identity. Blind signatures are one of the building blocks that can improve the security features of the wallet and protect user privacy. The second topic, FIDO authentication, is about the small tokens people use for authentication—like what Apple and Google are doing on their phones with Passkeys. My work there was more on the theoretical side, formally defining the protocols and their security while also proposing some improvements that introduced new privacy features.
What has been your greatest achievement during your time at CISPA, or which moment are you most proud of?
That would be 2023, when I had a lot of papers accepted. That was after the midterm evaluation where I was told to collaborate more with my students and get more publications out. And so I did! The result was that we got several papers in with both students and external collaborators. That felt really good. And when I was preparing my dossier, I checked the CS rankings and saw that I had one of the highest contributions to the publication points in 2023 for CISPA. It felt like a nice milestone and a proof that I was doing well.
Altogether you work at CISPA for 8 years now, starting as postdoc in 2017. How did you see the institution change during that time?
I started in 2017 as a postdoc in the research group of Michael Backes. Back then we were still part of the Saarland University. The group was very small and my Faculty colleagues Ben Stock and Sven Bugiel were as well still postdocs and research group leaders with Michael. We were just a few postdocs and PhD students sitting together in one big room. It felt very familiar. Then I became part of the CISPA-Stanford program and went to the US for a few years, coming back in 2020. By then, the group had grown and split across different sites. Of course, COVID also affected things, but now I see people trying again to rebuild that sense of community. CISPA has grown into one of the leading cybersecurity research centers in the world. It’s a huge change in just a few years.
What areas do you plan to focus on in your research over the next few years?
I’ll continue working on privacy-preserving cryptography. I also want to move more into the cryptocurrency domain. Not just blockchain itself, but the cryptography that makes cryptocurrencies work.
Will anything change in your work now that you are tenured?
Not much, actually, except that I’ll have more time for hands-on work. During the tenure track, I focused a lot on writing papers and theoretical work, but now I’d like to spend more time experimenting. I’m not under pressure to produce a high number of papers anymore, so I can focus on deeper, hands-on projects. The group will probably grow, and I’ll be able to supervise more students. I already have some great master’s students working as student assistants, so I’ll try to convince them to stay. That’s not too hard because CISPA offers excellent funding and contracts, which makes it easy to attract good people.
Thanks a lot for your time and good luck with your research.
