People
We are cryptographers. At King’s College London.
Staff
Benjamin Dowling is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London since August 2024. Previously, Benjamin was a Lecturer of Cybersecurity in the Security of Advanced Systems Research group at The University of Sheffield. Benjamin held postdoctoral researcher positions at the Applied Cryptography group at ETH Zurich, and at the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London under Kenny Paterson. He received his PhD at the Queensland University of Technology under the supervision of Douglas Stebila, which focused on the provable security of internet protocols. Benjamin is interested in the provable security of real-world cryptography, extending security frameworks to bridge the gap between theoretical cryptography and its usage in the real-world. His notable publications examine the security of secure communication protocols such as SSL/TLS, secure messaging protocols such as Signal and Matrix, and introducing post-quantum security in practical cryptographic protocols.
Eamonn Postlethwaite is a Lecturer in the Cybersecurity group of the Department of Informatics at King’s College London. Previously, he was a post doctoral researcher at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Amsterdam and a PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Martin Albrecht is a Professor of Cryptography in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London. He is also a Principal Research Scientist at SandboxAQ. Martin obtained his PhD at Royal Holloway under the supervision of Carlos Cid. He then went on to work as a postdoc with Jean-Charles Faugère (LIP6, Paris, France), Gregor Leander (DTU, Lyngby, Denmark) and Kenny Paterson (RHUL, Egham, UK). His Erdős–Bacon Number is 6.
Ngoc Khanh Nguyen is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Cryptography in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London. Previously, he was a post-doc at EPFL in Lausanne Switzerland, hosted by Alessandro Chiesa. Khanh obtained his PhD at ETH Zurich and IBM Research Europe - Zurich, under the supervision of Vadim Lyubashevsky and Dennis Hofheinz.
Simone Colombo is a Lecturer in Cryptography in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London. Previously, he was a post doctoral researcher in the same institution and a PhD student at EPFL.
Postdocs/ Fellows
Bhagya Wimalasiri is a Research Associate in Cryptography in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London. Previously, they pursued a PhD and served as a Research & Teaching Assistant in the Security of Advanced Systems (SoAS) group in the School of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield.
Joël Felderhoff is a Research Associate in Cryptography in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London. Previously, he was a PhD student in the AriC team in the LIP laboratory in the ENS de Lyon.
Robert Schädlich is a Research Associate in Cryptography in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London. He previously completed his PhD as a member of the CASCADE team at the DIENS laboratory at École normale supérieure in Paris. His research focuses on the construction of advanced cryptographic primitives with provable security under different computational hardness assumptions.
Tabitha Ogilvie is a Research Associate in Cryptography in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London. Prior to starting at KCL, she completed her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, as part of the Information Security Group. Her research focuses on the cryptanalysis of lattice-based schemes and homomorphic encryption.
PhD Students
Cyrill Graf is a is a PhD Student in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London under the supervision of Martin Albrecht. Before he joined the group in October 2025, he obtained a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in mathematics from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. His interests lie in number theory and discrete mathematics. His current work consists of generalising existing lattice-based constructions to the rings of integers of number fields or modules over them.
Filip Trenkic joined the group as a PhD student in 2024, working under the supervision of Eamonn Postlethwaite at King’s College London. Previously, Filip completed his BA-MMath at the University of Cambridge, with a focus on discrete mathematics and algebraic number theory.
George O’Rourke is a PhD student in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London, studying under the supervision of Ngoc Khanh Nguyen. Previously, he obtained a Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of St. Andrews, before spending some time working in industry. He is generally interested in the intersection of pure maths and theoretical computer science; in particular, mathematical elements of cryptography. He hopes to pursue research in the construction of cryptographic protocols based on lattices.
Jan Niklas Siemer is a PhD Student in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London under the supervision of Martin Albrecht. Before he joined the group in October 2024, he obtained a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in computer science from Paderborn University, Germany. He is interested in privacy-preserving constructions such as anonymous credential systems, analysing lattice-based security assumptions, and finding more robust approaches for the existing infrastructure.
Kirill Kutsenok is a PhD Student in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London under the supervision of Benjamin Dowling and Martin Albrecht. Previously, he obtained his MSc in Computer Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, under the supervision of Yuval Ishai and Ron Rothblum. Before his PhD, he worked in industry on provable security and security auditing of cryptographic protocols, including authenticated key exchange, digital signatures, and zero-knowledge-based systems. He is interested in understanding the security guarantees of cryptographic systems as they are built and deployed in practice.
Sam de Alfaro is a PhD Student in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London under the supervision of Benjamin Dowling and Martin Albrecht. Before joining the group in the Fall of 2026, they completed their Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in computer science at New York University. They are interested in the design and analysis of cryptographic protocols, particularly their application within real-world security frameworks.
Shubham Pawar is currently enrolled as a CDT student in the ISG at Royal Holloway, working under the supervision of Martin Albrecht at King’s College London. Previously, he completed his BS-MS at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune with a major in mathematics. His research interests lie in the intersection Theoretical Computer Science and Cryptography. At the moment he is working on reductions between cryptographic primitives and hopes to get more into post-quantum cryptography as his PhD progresses.
Visitors
Amit Deo is currently an independent researcher specialising in lattice-based cryptography. He obtained his PhD in 2019 as part of the CDT in Cyber Security at Royal Holloway, University of London. After graduating, he held a postdoctoral position at ENS de Lyon before working at Crypto Quantique and Zama. He is particularly interested in fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and how it can be optimised to suit a variety of practical applications. Aside from FHE, he has worked on topics such as oblivious pseudorandom functions and anamorphic cryptography.
Fernando Virdia is a Lecturer in Cyber Security at the University of Surrey. His work focuses on investigating and developing secure and practical cryptographic primitives.
Nina Bindel is currently a Senior Project Manager at MTG AG, Darmstadt, working on PKI and PQC. Before, she had been a researcher at the Cybersecurity Group at SandboxAQ, a postdoc in the cryptoplexity group led by Marc Fischlin at TU Darmstadt, and a postdoc at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) of the University of Waterloo (UW) in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Nina received her PhD in 2018 under the supervision of Johannes Buchmann from TU Darmstadt.
Rikke Bjerg Jensen is an ethnographer. She is also a Professor in the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL). Rikke obtained her PhD from the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) at the University of Westminster before becoming a postdoc at RHUL (Geography, Sociology). Grounded in ethnography, Rikke’s work centres on uncovering and understanding security notions and practices in distinct settings.
Sasha Lapiha is an Applied Cryptography Researcher at Silence Laboratories. Her research is focused on post-quantum threshold signatures and improving the proof techniques for module lattices. She holds a PhD in lattice-based cryptography from Royal Holloway, University of London.
Varun Maram is an assistant professor at the University of Warwick, and also a consultant at Input Output. His research focus is on the implications of quantum computation/information for cryptographic theory and applications. Varun obtained his PhD and Master’s at ETH Zürich, and his Bachelor’s at IIT Roorkee. Before joining Warwick, he held research positions in the industry – specifically, at SandboxAQ and Visa Research. His work was recognised with best paper awards at the PKC 2023 and PKC 2024 conferences. He is also a member of the team behind Classic McEliece, a cryptosystem which has been standardised by ISO as part of ISO/IEC 18033-2 for post-quantum encryption.
Former Members
- Fernando Virdia was a postdoc from 2024 to 2025.
- Yixin Shen was a postdoc fellow from 2023 to 2024.
Past Visitors
- Laz Panard (LIRMM) from April to July 2026.
- Adrien Dubois (ENS Lyon) from February to June 2025.