Starting from April 2023, I lead the group Secure Decentralized Systems at RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau. Before joining the CS department in Kaiserlautern, I was an assistant professor at TU Delft (2018-2023) and a post-doctoral researcher at University of Waterloo, working with Prof. Ian Goldberg (2016-2018). My PhD thesis, supervised by Prof. Dr. Thorsten Strufe at TU Dresden, won the KuVS award for the best PhD thesis in the area of networks and distributed systems in Germany.
My research focuses on trade-offs between privacy, security, and performance in decentralized systems. My work includes P2P Networks, with a focus on anonymity and censorship resistance. For instance, I contributed to the censorship-resistant P2P Network Freenet. Furthermore, I have worked on payment channel networks like Lightning, which improve the scalability of blockchains by allowing some transactions to be conducted locally. In particular, I designed SpeedyMurmurs, a local payment routing algorithm. At the moment, I am involved in various projects that analyze and improve the security and privacy of distributed machine learning systems such as Federated Learning and Multi-Discriminator GANs. For more information about on-going projects, please consult our Research page.
Selected publications: