Pietrzak Group
Cryptography
The cryptography group works on problems in theoretical and applied cryptography, the science behind information security. Current projects include:
Sustainable Blockchains. The group invents and develops proof systems like proofs of space or verifiable delay functions, and uses them toward constructing new protocols like sustainable blockchains.
Group Messaging. Messaging applications like Signal or WhatsApp are hugely popular and provide surprisingly strong security guarantees. The team works on group messaging, which aims at developing messaging protocols that efficiently scale to large groups without giving up any of the strong security and privacy guarantees of existing solutions.
Leakage-resilient cryptography. The team constructs schemes that are provably secure against “side-channel attacks”, where an attacker exploits information leaked during computation from a cryptographic device like a smart card.
Group Leader
Administrative Support
Team
Current Projects
Sustainable blockchains | Leakage-, Tamper-, and Trojan-resilient cryptography | Group messaging | Adaptive security
Publications
Acharya A, Azari K, Baig MA, Hofheinz D, Kamath C. 2025. Securely instantiating ‘Half Gates’ garbling in the standard model. 28th IACR International Conference on Practice and Theory of Public-Key Cryptography. PKC: Public-Key Cryptography, LNCS, vol. 15677, 37–75. View
Cueto Noval M, Merz S-P, Stählin P, Ünal A. 2025. On the soundness of algebraic attacks against code-based assumptions. 44th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques. EUROCRYPT: International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, LNCS, vol. 15606, 385–415. View
Hoffmann C, Pietrzak KZ. 2025. Watermarkable and zero-knowledge Verifiable Delay Functions from any proof of exponentiation. 28th IACR International Conference on Practice and Theory of Public-Key Cryptography. PKC: Public-Key Cryptography, LNCS, vol. 15674, 36–66. View
Brzuska C, Ünal A, Woo IKY. 2024. Evasive LWE assumptions: Definitions, classes, and counterexamples. 30th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security. ASIACRYPT: Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security, LNCS, vol. 15487, 418–449. View
ReX-Link: Krzysztof Pietrzak
Career
Since 2016 Professor, Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA)
2011 – 2016 Assistant Professor, Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA)
2005 – 2011 Scientific Staff Member, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2006 Postdoc, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France
2005 PhD, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Selected Distinctions
2015 ERC Consolidator Grant
2010 ERC Starting Grant
Additional Information
Download CV
Open Pietrzak group website
Physics & Beyond at ISTA
