Speakers

Prof. Dennis Akos (University of Colorado Boulder, USA)

Professor Dennis M. Akos has a deep background in satellite navigation technology having pioneered the Global Positioning System (GPS)/Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) software radio implementation. He has been involved with GPS/GNSS related research for more than 20 years investigating all elements of the receiver from the antenna, front end radio design, signal processing and navigation solution. He was the co-founder of Nordnav Technologies, a start-up developing GPS/GNSS receivers for the mobile market, which was acquired for $70M by Cambridge Silicon Radio.

His Ph.D. dissertation was on the use of the software radio design philosophy for GPS receiver architectures. This was done at the Ohio University Avionics Engineering Center which has had strong connections for FAA related project. His first academic position was with Lulea Technical University in Sweden where he focused on radio architectures of all types from the antenna design, downconversion, mixing, and filtering, as well as amplification. While in Sweden he conducted research for Eurocontrol, investigating the potential of the VDL Mode 4 system. He returned to the US to the Stanford University GPS Laboratory and heavily involved in GPS/GNSS related research for the FAA's Local Area Augmentation System (LAAS) and Wide Area Augmentation Systems (WAAS). Since 2004 he has been a faculty member with the University of Colorado Boulder.

Since arriving in Boulder his research has had three main thrusts: 1) furthering the software radio concept for all satellite navigation constellations (GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, and Galileo); 2) use of the GPS/GNSS receiver for remote sensing applications (wind speed, soil moisture, vegetation growth, and atmospheric parameters) and autonomous vehicles; 3) GPS/GNSS receiver architectures for radio frequency interference mitigation as well as GPS/GNSS spoof detection and mitigation. Visit Homepage

Mr. Robin Blokker (FRA, Sweden)

Robin Blokker is an it-security specialist at the National Defense Radio Establishment (FRA) with extensive experience of technical security audits of government agencies, high security networks and critical infrastructure. Robin is also spokesperson in technical matters for the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC).

Dr. Luc Bläser (Dfinity, Switzerland)

Luc Bläser is a staff software engineer at the DFINITY Foundation, leading a new AI team for LLM-based program code generation, and contributing to the Motoko programming language. Luc’s main interests are on programming languages, compilers and runtime systems, as well as recently, also AI-based code generation. Before joining DFINITY, he was a professor of software engineering for 11 years at the University of Applied Sciences of Eastern Switzerland. In 2019, Luc was also a visiting professor at the University of California, Irvine. He holds a PhD in programming languages and runtime systems from ETH Zurich.

Dr. Jan Camenisch (Dfinity, Switzerland)

Jan Camenisch is CTO at the DFINITY Foundation which is a major contributor the Internet Computer blockchain. He also serves on Sovrin‘s Technical Governance Board. Jan has published over 150 widely cited papers, was granted about 140 patents worldwide, gave numerous keynotes and invited talks at international conferences, and has received a number of awards for his work, including the 2010 ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award, the 2013 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award, and the 2018 IFIP Kristian Beckman Award. Visit Homepage

Prof. Liqun Chen (Surrey University, UK)

Liqun Chen is a Professor in Secure Systems at the University of Surrey. Before taking up this position in 2016, she was a principal research scientist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol, UK. Her 19 years working for the company led to 79 granted US patents. She developed several cryptographic schemes that were adopted by International Standards bodies, such as ISO/IEC, IEEE and TCG (Trusted Computing Group). Notably, she co-designed several cryptographic algorithms, including direct anonymous attestation, which are used in the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). She was the technical leader and principal investigator in the EU H2020 FutureTPM project, which identified and developed algorithms for a TPM that would be secure against quantum computer attacks. Additionally, she has served as a principal investigator in six other EU Horizon projects, which make use of post-quantum cryptography, trusted computing and distributed ledger technologies to achieve security, privacy and trust in real-world applications. She has acted as an editor or co-editor for 11 ISO/IEC documents and assisted with TCG's TPM specifications. Her current research interests include applied cryptography, trusted computing, and security standardisation. Visit Homepage

Prof. Mauro Conti (University of Padua, Italy)

Mauro Conti is Full Professor at the University of Padua, Italy. He is also a Wallenberg WASP Guest Professor at Örebro University, Sweden. He obtained his Ph.D. from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, in 2009. After his Ph.D., he was a Post-Doc Researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In 2011 he joined as Assistant Professor at the University of Padua, where he became Associate Professor in 2015, and Full Professor in 2018. He has been Visiting Researcher at GMU, UCLA, UCI, TU Darmstadt, UF, FIU, and Affiliate Professor at TU Delft. He has been awarded with a Marie Curie Fellowship (2012) by the European Commission, with a Fellowship by the German DAAD (2013), and with a WASP Fellowship by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (2025). His research is also funded by companies, including Cisco, Intel, and Huawei. His main research interest is in the area of Security and Privacy. In this area, he published more than 600 papers in topmost international peer-reviewed journals and conferences. He is area Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, and has been Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (2022-24) and Associate Editor for several journals, including IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, and IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management. He was Program Chair for TRUST 2015, ICISS 2016, WiSec 2017, ACNS 2020, CANS 2021, CSS 2021, WiMob 2023 and ESORICS 2023, and General Chair for SecureComm 2012, SACMAT 2013, NSS 2021, ACNS 2022, RAID 2024, NDSS 2026 and 2027. He is Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the AAIA, Distinguished Member of the ACM, and Fellow of the Young Academy of Europe. In 2022, he was named Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, by the President of the Republic. Visit Homepage

Prof. Alexandra Dmitrienko (Würzburg University, Germany)

Dr. Alexandra Dmitrienko is an esteemed Professor at the University of Wuerzburg in Germany and the head of the Secure Software Systems research group. With a distinguished academic background, Dr. Dmitrienko earned her PhD in Security and Information Technology with summa cum laude distinction from TU Darmstadt in 2015. Her doctoral research focused on enhancing the security and privacy of mobile systems and applications, earning recognition from both academic consortia and industrial organizations such as the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM STM WG 2016 Award) and Intel (Intel Doctoral Student Honor Award, 2013).

Dr. Dmitrienko’s academic journey encompasses a wealth of experience garnered from prominent security institutions in Germany and Switzerland. Prior to assuming her current faculty position in 2018, she acquired expertise at institutions including Ruhr-University Bochum (2008-2011), Fraunhofer Institute for Information Security in Darmstadt (2011-2015), and ETH Zurich (2016-2017). Throughout her career, Dr. Dmitrienko's research interests have spanned diverse domains within cybersecurity, including software security, systems security and privacy, and the security and privacy of mobile, cyber-physical, and distributed systems. Today, her research also largely focuses on security and privacy aspects of Machine Learning methods. Visit Homepage

Prof. Sokratis Katsikas (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway)

Sokratis K. Katsikas was born in Athens, Greece, in 1960. He is the Director of the Norwegian Centre for Cybersecurity in Critical Sectors and Professor with the Department of Information Security and Communication Technology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is also Professor Emeritus of the Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, Greece. In 2019 he was awarded a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Department of Production and Management Engineering, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece. In May-June 2023 he served as Minister of Digital Governance in the interim (caretaking) government of the Hellenic Republic. In 2023 and in 2024 he was listed in the Stanford University list of the top 2% most cited scientists worldwide and in 2024 he was listed in the ScholarGPS Top Scholars list of the top 0.5% of all scholars worldwide. He has authored or co-authored more than 300 journal papers, book chapters and conference proceedings papers. He is serving on the editorial board of several scientific journals, he has co-authored/edited 52 books and conference proceedings and has served on/chaired the technical programme committee of more than 1000 international scientific conferences. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the ESORICS Conference (chair 2017-2023) and he is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Information Security (Springer). Visit Homepage

Prof. Wenjing Lou (Virginia Tech, USA)

Wenjing Lou is the W. C. English Endowed Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech and a Fellow of both the IEEE and the ACM. Her research interests cover many topics in the cybersecurity field, with her current research focusing on security and privacy problems in wireless networks, blockchain, trustworthy machine learning, and Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Prof. Lou is a highly cited researcher by the Web of Science Group. She received the Virginia Tech Alumni Award for Research Excellence in 2018, the highest university-level faculty research award. She received the INFOCOM Test-of-Time paper award in 2020. She is the TPC chair for IEEE INFOCOM 2019 and ACM WiSec 2020. She was the Steering Committee Chair for IEEE CNS conference from 2013 to 2020. She is currently the vice chair of IEEE INFOCOM and a steering committee member of IEEE CNS. She served as a program director at the US National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2014 to 2017. Visit Homepage

Mrs. Allison Mankin (PCH, IRTF, USA)

Allison Mankin is an Internet protocol leader and researcher based in the Washington DC area and is the DNS Services lead at Packet Clearing House (PCH). She has a long history in and around the IETF and IRTF, including serving as IRTF Chair, Transport AD, IPng AD, and Nomcom Chair. Most recently, she serves on the IETF's ombudsteam and has been working actively on/authoring DNS privacy standards. Allison is experienced in academic, industry, infrastructure and government settings (in addition to standards). Some of her earlier positions were at Mitre, USC/ISI, the US National Science Foundation (NSF), Bell Labs, and Verisign Labs. Allison founded the Systers group at IETF and is devoted to inclusive team development. Visit Homepage

Prof. Adrian Perrig (ETH Zürich, Switzerland)

Adrian Perrig is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zürich, Switzerland, where he leads the network security group. He is also a co-founder of and board member at Anapaya Systems, and an advisor to Mysten Labs. He is a recipient of the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award, and is an ACM and IEEE Fellow. Adrian's research revolves around building secure systems -- in particular his group is working on the SCION next-generation Internet architecture. Visit Homepage

Prof. Radha Poovendran (University of Washington, USA)

Dr. Radha Poovendran is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he directs the Network Security Lab (NSL@UW) since 2001. He received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and an M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, respectively. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park. His research interests are in the areas of Adversarial Modeling, Resilient cyber-physical systems, Safety and Security of LLMs and LRMs, Synthetic Data for LLM, Coding and Math. Recent public Synthetic Data contributions on GitHub include Magpie Align, Kodcode, and SafeDecoding. Visit Homepage

RoyalRoppers (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)

RoyalRoppers has been one of Sweden's top-rated CTF teams for the last couple of years. The team is primarily composed of KTH students as well as cybersecurity professionals and high school students. In addition to competing in CTFs, RoyalRoppers organizes meetups and events. The team has won multiple national competitions and has qualified for the finals of some of the most significant international CTF events. The talk is given by four members of the team.

Karl has been a part of RoyalRoppers since 2022 and mainly does cryptography.

Diogo has started playing CTFs in 2022 after joining STT, and later RoyalRoppers. He has a fond interest in web exploitation.

Tomás started playing CTFs in 2024, when he joined RoyalRoppers. He is still learning the ropes but especially enjoys learning about cryptography.

Nils joined RoyalRoppers in 2024 and is currently their Vice President. He focuses on cryptography challenges but also enjoys web exploitation. Visit Homepage

Prof. Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi (TU Darmstadt, Germany)

Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi is a professor of Computer Science and the head of the System Security Lab at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. He has led several Collaborative Research Labs with Intel since 2012 and Huawei since 2019.

He has studied Mechanical and Electrical Engineering and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Saarland, Germany. Before academia, he worked in the R&D of IT enterprises, including Ericsson Telecommunications. He has continuously contributed to the field of security and privacy research. He was Editor-In-Chief of IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine and had been serving on the editorial board of ACM TODAES, ACM TIOT, and ACM DTRAP.

He received the renowned German "Karl Heinz Beckurts" award for his influential research on Trusted and Trustworthy Computing. This award honors excellent scientific achievements that have significantly impacted industrial innovations in Germany. In 2018, he received the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contributions Award for dedicated research, education, and management leadership in the security community and pioneering contributions in content protection, mobile security, and hardware-assisted security. In 2021, he was honored with the Intel Academic Leadership Award at the USENIX Security Conference for his influential research on cybersecurity, particularly hardware-assisted security. In 2022, he received the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant. In 2024, he received the DAC (Design Automation Conference) Service Award. Visit Homepage

Prof. Gene Tsudik (UC Irvine, USA)

Gene Tsudik is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from USC in 1991. Before coming to UCI in 2000, he was at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory (1991-1996) and USC/ISI (1996-2000). His research interests include many topics in security, privacy and applied cryptography. Notably, these do not include Machine Learning, Differential Privacy as well as Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies. Gene Tsudik was a Fulbright Scholar (Italy) and a 3-time Fulbright Specialist (Singapore, Taiwan, and Myanmar). He is a fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAS, and IFIP, as well as a foreign member of Academia Europaea. From 2009 to 2015 he served as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS, formerly known as TISSEC). He was the recipient of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contribution Award, the 2020 IFIP Jean-Claude Laprie Award. the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award, the 2024 NDSS Test-of-Time Award, and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. He also authored the first rhyming crypto-poem published as a refereed paper. Sadly, he has no social media presence. Visit Homepage