This field focuses on foundational and practical aspects of security, trust, privacy, and accountability in computer systems. Topics of study include formal analysis of security properties; anonymity networks; privacy and trust issues in mobile apps, social networks, and Web advertising; and accountability in distributed systems, to name just a few.
Groups and Researchers in this Field
Principles of Security and Privacy
Gilles Barthe's research interests lie in the areas of programming languages and program verification, software and system security, cryptography, formal methods and logic. His goal is to develop foundations and tools for reasoning about security and privacy properties of algorithms and implementations. His recent work focuses on building relational verification methods for probabilistic programs and on their applications in cryptography and privacy. He is also interested in provably secure countermeasures against side-channel attacks. Read more
Asia Biega is a tenure-track faculty member at the MPI for Security and Privacy. Through interdisciplinary collaborations, she designs ethically, socially, and legally responsible information and social computing systems and studies how they interact with and influence their users. Before joining Microsoft Research, she completed her PhD summa cum laude at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Saarland University. Her doctoral work focused on the issues of privacy and fairness in search systems. She has published her work in leading information retrieval, Web, and data mining venues. Beyond academia, her perspectives and methodological approaches are informed by an industrial experience, including work on privacy infrastructure at Google and consulting for Microsoft product teams on issues related to FATE (Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics) and privacy. Read more
Marcel Böhme is a tenure-track faculty at MPI-SP and head of the Software Security research group. His current research interest is the automatic discovery of software bugs and security flaws at the very large scale. One part of his group develops the foundations of automatic software testing (an approach to finding bugs by auto-generating executions) to elucidate fundamental limitations of existing techniques, and to explore the assurances that software testing provides when no bugs are found. The other part of his group develops practical vulnerability discovery tools that are publicly available and widely used in software security practice. Read more
Meeyoung Cha is a scientific director of MPI-SP in Bochum, Germany. Her interests include data science and computational social science, with a focus on understanding social information and human-machine interactions. Meeyoung’s research on misinformation, poverty mapping, fraud detection, and long-tail content has received wide citations and best paper awards. She is the recipient of the Korean Young Information Scientist Award 2019, the AAAI ICWSM Test-of-Time! Award 2020, and the ACM IMC Test-of-Time Award 2022. Prior to joining MPI, Meeyoung was a chief investigator at IBS (2019-current), a faculty member at KAIST (2010-current), a visiting professor at Facebook (2015-2016), and a postdoctoral researcher at MPI-SWS (2008-2010). She received her Ph.D. in computer science from KAIST in 2008. Read more
Peter Druschel is the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, where he leads the Distributed Systems research group. He is also an adjunct professor at Saarland University, Associate Director of the Center for IT-Security, Privacy, and Accountability, and a Principal Investigator in the Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction. He has received an NSF CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Mark Weiser Award. His research interests are in understanding, designing, and building computer systems. In the past, he has worked on operating systems, network services, peer-to-peer systems, and accountable distributed systems. Currently, he is interested in practical techniques to make distributed and mobile systems secure, accountable, and privacy-preserving. Read more
Deepak Garg’s interests include computer security and privacy, formal logic, and programming languages. He is head of the Foundations of Computer Security group, associated with both the Security & Privacy and the Programming Languages & Verification research areas at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. The group’s current projects investigate tracking and controlling flows of sensitive information through Web browsers, using type systems to statically estimate the asymptotic complexity of incremental runs of programs, creating mechanisms to enforce data protection policies across multiple system infrastructure layers, extending separation logics to reason about security protocols, and developing foundations and algorithms for temporal logic-based privacy audits of legal compliance, among others. Read more
Jonas Geiping leads a joint research group at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the ELLIS Institute Tübingen. His group is interested in questions of safety and efficiency in modern machine learning. There are a number of fundamental machine learning questions that come up in these topics that we still do not understand well. In safety, examples are questions about the principles of data poisoning, the subtleties of water-marking for generative models, privacy questions in federated learning, or adversarial attacks against large language models. Can we ever make these models “safe”, and how do we define this? Are there feasible technical solutions that reduce harm?
Further, the research group is interested in questions about the efficiency of modern AI systems, especially for large language models. How efficient can we make these systems, can we train strong models with little compute? Can we extend the capabilities of language models with recursive computation? How do efficiency modifications impact the safety of these models? Read more
Krishna Gummadi heads the Social Computing research group at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. He is broadly interested in understanding and building networked and distributed computer systems. Currently, the group's research focuses on social computing systems: an emerging class of societal-scale human-computer systems that facilitate interactions and knowledge exchange between individuals, organizations, and governments in our society. A few examples include social networking sites like Facebook, blogging and microblogging sites like LiveJournal and Twitter, and content sharing sites like YouTube, among many others. Through user studies, examining data, and building systems, the group aims to understand, predict, and control the behavior of their constituent human users and computer systems. Read more
Jana Hofmann is a tenure-track faculty member at MPI-SP and leads the group for Foundations of Information Security and Trust. She develops techniques that create strong security and privacy guarantees in both hardware and software systems. Her recent work focuses on modeling, detecting, and preventing information leakage through microarchitectural side channels. Prior to joining MPI-SP, Jana was a postdoctoral researcher at Azure Research, Microsoft, where she worked on principled designs for side-channel protection. She completed her PhD at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and Saarland University. Her thesis received the university’s Dr.-Eduard-Martin prize for the best computer science dissertation of the year. Read more
Cătălin Hrițcu is a tenured faculty member at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP). He is particularly interested in security foundations (secure compilation, compartmentalization, memory safety, security protocols, information flow), programming languages (program verification, proof assistants, dependent types, formal semantics, mechanized metatheory, property-based testing), and the design and verification of secure systems (reference monitors, secure compilation chains, tagged architectures). He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant on formally secure compilation and is also actively involved in the design of the F* verification system. Read more
Giulio Malavolta is a tenure-track faculty at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP). He is primarily interested in theoretical and applied aspects of cryptography and his work often intersects with other disciplines such as quantum computing, concurrent systems, cryptocurrencies, and game theory. His recent work focuses on establishing new feasibility results for cryptographic schemes with advanced functionalities. Read more
Christof Paar is a scientific director at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy in Bochum, Germany, and affiliated professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research lies in the area of embedded security. His group is currently working on hardware Trojans, technical and cognitive aspects of (hardware) reverse engineering, physical layer security and the security of cyber-physical systems. He is one of the spokespersons of the Excellence Cluster CASA – Cyber Security in the Age of Large-Scale Adversaries. Prior to joining MPI, Christof was with the Ruhr University Bochum (2001-2019) and WPI in Massachusetts (1995-2001). He spent the academic years 2008/09 and 2014 – 2016 as a research professor at UMass Amherst. He received a Ph.D. in engineering from the Institute for Experimental Mathematics at the University of Essen in 1994. Read more
Clara Schneidewind heads the Heinz Nixdorf Research Group for Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts at MPI-SP. In her research, she aims to develop solutions for the meaningful, secure, resource-saving, and privacy-preserving usage of blockchain technologies. The current projects of the group center around improving the security of distributed applications (smart contracts) in the presence of the asynchronous and adversarial blockchain execution environment; tackling blockchain scalability issues in a principle manner through the usage of off-chain protocols; and exploring the foundations of interoperable, blockchain-enabled computation. The main objective of all these projects is to back the developed solutions with strong theoretical foundations to ensure the high degree of reliability demanded in the presence of monetary incentives. Read more
Peter Schwabe is a tenured faculty member at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP). He is also a professor at the Institute for Computing and Information Sciences at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. His research is in the area of cryptography, specifically the design and secure implementation of cryptographic primitives. In recent years he is mainly working on post-quantum cryptography, i.e., cryptographic primitives that run on standard hardware, but remain secure even against attackers equipped with a large universal quantum computer. He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant for this work on engineering post-quantum cryptography. Peter is furthermore interested in high-assurance cryptography, an area that brings together techniques and tools from formal methods and research into cryptographic software to improve the quality of cryptographic systems we use every day to protect our digital assets. Read more
Yixin Zou will join MPI-SP in January 2023 as a tenure-track faculty member leading the Human-Centered Security and Privacy group. Her research spans human-computer interaction, privacy, and security, focusing on improving consumers’ adoption of protective behaviors and supporting the digital safety of at-risk populations. Her research has been recognized with the 2022 John Karat Usable Privacy and Security Student Research Award and best paper awards/honorable mentions at ACM CHI and SOUPS. In addition, her research has generated broader impacts on industry practice (e.g., Mozilla and NortonLifeLock) and public policy, including the rulemaking process for the California Consumer Privacy Act. Yixin received a Ph.D. in Information from the University of Michigan. Read more
