Lucjan Hanzlik is already well known at CISPA. During his Ph.D. studies, he received the IBM Great Minds award and did an internship at IBM Zurich in the group of Dr. Jan Camenisch. After his doctorate at the Institute of Computer Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2016 under the supervision of Prof. Mirosław Kutyłowski, he joined CISPA in 2017. There he became part of the prestigious CISPA-Stanford program and took up a one-year postdoctoral position in the group of Professor Michael Backes. He then became a research group leader and moved to Stanford as part of the CISPA-Stanford program, where he worked as a visiting assistant professor in the group of Professor Dan Boneh. After his return from the US, he will take up his post as a CISPA faculty. His research focuses on applied cryptography and in the use of cryptograph for privacy protection in e-Government systems. He is also interested in embedded devices, smart cards, and the implementation of cryptographic schemes.
Michael Schwarz is joining CISPA from the University of Technology Graz. He started his scientific career at the TU Graz. After his studies, he completed his doctorate there, under the supervision of Daniel Gruss. Most recently, he worked as a postdoc at the Institute of Applied Information Processing and Communications. The security researcher was part of the team that discovered the security holes „Meltdown“ and „Spectre“ in 2017. His doctoral thesis „Software-based Side-Channel Attacks and Defenses in Restricted Environments“ deals with the topic of ZombieLoad. Michael Schwarz has been awarded several prizes. These include the „EuroSys Roger Needham PhD Award“ and „Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Competition Honorable Mention: Meltdown.“
Another new faculty is coming to CISPA from the TU Darmstadt. His name is Cristian-Alexandru Staicu. His scientific career began at the Universitatea Politehnica din Timișoara in Romania. He studied in the Netherlands at the University of Twente and at the University of Trento in Italy, among others, before he went to Darmstadt in 2014 as a doctoral student of Prof. Dr. Michael Pradel. His research interest lies in the analysis of privacy and security of JavaScript code, mostly using language-based techniques. Staicu works mostly on finding and preventing vulnerabilities, especially in server-side JavaScript programs and so-called server-side libraries. In one of his recent works, he investigated data privacy issues in connection with image requests. He and his colleagues uncovered several security vulnerabilities in popular websites such as Microsoft (MSRC-44458), Google (issue 76401777), Facebook (fixed) and Twitter (fixed).
