Elena Andreeva

Welcome to my webpage!

I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Security and Privacy Research Unit at TU Wien, Vienna, Austria.

Background

I was an Assistant Professor in the Cyber Security Group at DTU, Denmark and a Lecturer in the Cyber Security Research Group at University of Klagenfurt, Austria. Prior to that, I worked as a Research Expert in the COSIC Research Group, KU Leuven, Belgium. My PhD and my Postdoctoral research was also at COSIC and was funded by PhD and Postdoctoral grants from the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO). I completed my PhD, entitled Domain Extenders for Cryptographic Hash Functions under the supervision of prof. Bart Preneel. I hold a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Saarland, Germany.

Research Interests

My research interests lie in the area of theory and applications of cryptography and more concretely in symmetric cryptography, authenticated encryption, forkciphers and expanding functions, hash functions, key derivation, provable security, privacy-friendly security protocols, and cryptography for blockchains. I am interested in theory and development of provably secure cryptographic designs for secure data communications , storage and private computation .

Cryptographic designs

Some of my cryptographic design contributions include:

• ABR tree hashing - a novel optimally efficient tree hash function that achieves collision security.
• Forkcipher - a novel expanding symmetric primitive. The forkcipher instance ForkSkinny is used in the ForkAE authenticated encryption family which is a Round 2 NIST lightweight cryptography qualifier ForkAE.
• ButterKnife - a novel symmetric expanding function that takes an n-bit input to produce an 8n-bit output via a public tweak and secret key. SAFE and ZAFE are deterministic authenticated encryption schemes that are built on top of ButterKnife and achieve close to n-bit security and highly efficient performance.
• COLM is the development of the original AES-COPA authenticated encryption scheme which is a winner in the defense-in-depth category of the CAESAR authenticated encryption cryptographic competition. The COLM design was invited for publication in the Journal of Cryptology.
• PRIMATEs PRIMATE lightweight authenticated encryption family (APE, Hanuman, Gibbon) is a Round 2 qualifier in the CAESAR authenticated encryption cryptographic competition.