Miro Haller

Our society increasingly relies on technology in all aspects of life without always understanding the implications and consequences. As more and more devices are connected, the boundaries between physical and digital systems blur, giving rise to a plethora of security and privacy issues. Widespread enthusiasm about advanced cryptographic techniques — such as zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption, and MPC — leads to the fast adoption of complex algorithms to protect users in strong threat models, such as fully malicious servers.

It is essential that we analyze these systems to gain a better understanding of the justification of theoretic security assumptions in practice. In case of discrepancies, cryptanalysis helps to harden existing systems and improve our understanding of their concrete security guarantees. Furthermore, attacks expose fundamental problems in current deployments which informs the design of solutions resolving these issues.

I aim to contribute to improving the security and privacy of deployed systems by putting them to the test and identifying cryptographic vulnerabilities. Furthermore, I challenge the status quo and contribute ideas to improve it. I am very grateful to get the opportunity to work on these goals during my Ph.D. at UCSD with my advisor Nadia Heninger and various outstanding internal and external collaborators.