Dr Sushmita Ruj | UNSW Research

My Expertise

Cryptography, Blockchains, Data Privacy, Quantum-safe Technologies, Internet of Things Security, Cloud Security

Keywords

classical to quantum transition

Fields of Research (FoR)

Cryptography, Cybersecurity and privacy, Cyberphysical systems and internet of things, Cloud computing, Data security and protection, Data and information privacy, Privacy and data rights, Quantum technologies

SEO tags

Information and Communication Services

Communication Networks and Services not elsewhere classified

Electronic Information Storage and Retrieval Services

Biography

Faculty of Engineering Lead, IfCyber

I am the Faculty of Engineering Lead, UNSW Institute for Cybersecurity, IFCYBER and Senior Lecturer (equivalent to US Associate Professor) in the School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), UNSW, Sydney. I will start my term as an Associate Professor (equivalent to US Full Professor) from 1 January 2025. I am also the Taste of Research (ToR) Coordinator within CSE. This is a unique program which...view more

Faculty of Engineering Lead, IfCyber

My primary research interests are in applied cryptography, post-quantum cryptography, cybersecurity, blockchains and data privacy. I design practical, efficient and provably secure protocols that can be deployed in real-life applications. My interests are in critical infrastructure including smart grids and cloud, ad hoc networks and data sharing frameworks. As the world builds stronger capability in quantum technology, I am trying to design quantum safe algorithms to transition to a safer Internet. Recently, I have also been interested in ethical aspects of cybersecurity and legal and regulatory aspects around data sharing.

My aim is to carry out impactful research for the benefit of the society and mentor students to be critical thinkers and leaders. I love to work with my students and collaborate with the government, academia and industry. This has made research a very enriching experience for me. I have collaborated with researchers across five continents and have delivered over 100 technical lectures around the world. I have won several competitive grants like Samsung GRO Award, NetApp Faculty Fellowship, Cisco Academic Grant and IBM Research grant. I am a senior member of ACM and IEEE.

I am on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), Elsevier Journal Pervasive and Mobile Computing (PMC). I have served as an Associate Editor of Elsevier Journal of Information Security and Applications (JISA). Program Co- Chairs for ACISP 2021 and Indocrypt 2020. Besides, I have served on the program committees of many conferences like ACM ASIACCS, ACNS, ICDCS, Indocrypt, IEEE ICBC, IEEE Globecom, IEEE ICC to name a few. I served as a member of the working group on “Blockchain For Cybersecurity” working group of the National Blockchain Roadmap of Australia and the first Blockchain Working group set up by the Reserve bank of India. I was a member of Trans-Tasman Initiative on Post Quantum Cryptography research.

Prior to joining UNSW, I was a Senior Research Scientist in CSIRO's Data61 (2019-2022) where amongst other project I led a project on Data Sharing which was a Merit Winner at NSW Innovation Award (iAward). Previously, I was an Associate Professor at Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata and an Assistant Professor at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indore. I have worked as a Security Researcher at University of Ottawa, Canada and Lund University, Sweden (as a Erasmus Mundas Post Doctoral Fellow).

I completed a Ph. D. and Master's Degree in Computer Science from Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. My Ph. D. thesis was about Cryptographic Key Management. My Master's thesis was about Graph Ramsey Theory and got me an Erdos Number of 2. I was an undergradate student in Computer Science in Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research (Erstwhile B.E. College, Shibpur), the second oldest Engineering College in India.

I was born in Durgapur, a beautiful, quiet Indian city known for its Steel Plant. I went to Carmel School, Steel Township and DAV Model School.

Link to my researcher profile: https://research.unsw.edu.au/people/sushmita-ruj

My Grants

Selected Grants:

- Chief Investigator: "Blockchain Based Quantum Safe for Secure Digital Medical Passport", ARC Linkage Project, 2025-2028.

- Lead Chief Investigator: "Embedding Trust in Digital IDs for Consumers", Trustworthy Digital Society, 2025-2026.

- Chief Investigator: "Resilience of Supply Chain Unstructured Data", Defence Trailblazer Grant with Guardware Australia, 2025-2028.

- Lead Chief Investigator: "Analysing DNS Abuse in .au Domains", auDA, 2023-2024.

- Lead Chief Investigator, “Privacy and Verifiability for Responsible Technologies”, Global Research and Innovation Program (GRIP), UNSW, 2023-2024.

- Chief Investigator: “Trusted Automation for Industrial Internet of Things”, CSIRO Next Generation Graduates Program (QUT-UNSW Collaboration), 2022-2027.

- Lead Chief Investigator: Security and Privacy of Blockchain Enabled Carbon Trading Platforms. Center for Critical Digital Infrastructure, UNSW, Sydney, 2022.

- Joint Lead Chief Investigator: Analysing Proof of Stake Protocols. Joint award from School of Computer Science and Engineering and School of Information Systems and Technology Management, UNSW, Sydney, 2022-2023.

- Project Lead, “Automatic Assessment and Protection of Personal Information for Data Sharing”, Cyber Security CRC, WA, Government, NSW Government and Australian Computer Society. 2020-2022.

- Chief Investigator, “Data61 CRP43 - Novel security solutions in the context of AI and potential quantum supremacy”, 2020-2023.

- Chief Investigator, “ Securing Cloud Storage”, Funding Agency, Cisco, Inc, USA, 2017 - 2019.

- Chief Investigator, “Auditing Schemes for Cloud Storage”. Funding agency, NetApp Inc, USA. 2016 -2019.

- Chief Investigator, “Study on Security and Privacy of Internet of Things (IoT)”. Funding agency, Samsung Electronics, Korea, 2014-2016.

-Chief Investigator (India Side), “Computational Aspects of Mathematical Design and Analysis of Secure Communication Systems Based on Cryptographic Primitives”, Indo-Japan Cooperative Science Program. Funding Agency DST, Govt. of India and JSPS, Japan. 2014-2016.

My Awards

JNCA Best Survey Award for the paper "A comprehensive survey on attacks, security issues and blockchain solutions for IoT and IIoT", Elsevier Journal of Network and Computer Applications, December 2023.
NSW Innovation Award (iAward) Merit Winner, 2022 (Awarded to project on Personal Information Assessment and Protection, led at CSIRO)
Women in Science Award CSIRO (SCS, Data61), June 2020.
WIE Best Paper award in IEEE ANTS, December, 2017.
Cisco Academic Research Grant, March 2017.
University Partner (CI), Open Collaborative Science Project (OCSP) Program with IBM Research on Blockchains, February 2017.
ACM Senior Member, 2016.
NetApp faculty fellowship, 2016.
Selected for Japan Trust International Research Collaboration Program. Collaborated with KDDI R&D Labs, Japan. (April-June 2016).
IEEE Senior Member, 2015.
Samsung GRO award, 2014.
Finalist for (Indian National Science Academy) INSA Young Scientist Award 2014.
Best Paper Award at 22nd IEEE PIMRC, 2011.
Best Paper Award at The Fifth International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing and Applications, ISPA07, 2007.

My Research Activities

Applied Cryptography, Post Quantum Cryptography, Blockchains, Data privacy, Cybersecurity.

Google Scholar, DBLP

Recent (since 2022) Selected Publications:

Conference

Xinyu Zhang, Ron Steinfeld, Muhammed Esgin, Joseph Liu, Dongxi Liu, Sushmita Ruj, Loquat: A SNARK-Friendly Post-Quantum Signature based on the Legendre PRF with Applications in Ring and Aggregate Signatures, IACR Crypto 2024.
Evan Krul, Helen Paik, Sushmita Ruj, Salil Kanhere, SOK: Trusting Self-Sovereign Identity, Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, PETS, 2024.
Xinyu Zhang, Ron Steinfeld, Joseph Liu, Muhammed F. Esgin, Dongxi Liu and Sushmita Ruj, DualRing-PRF: Post-Quantum (Linkable) Ring Signatures from Legendre and Power Residue PRFs, ACISP 2024. (Best Paper Award)
Muhammed F. Esgin, Ron Steinfeld, Dongxi Liu, and Sushmita Ruj. Efficient Hybrid Exact/Relaxed Lattice Proofs and Applications to Rounding and VRFs, IACR Crypto 2023.
Boqian Ma, Vir Pathak, Lanping Liu and Sushmita Ruj, One-Phase Batch Update on Sparse Merkle Trees for Rollups, Symposium on Digital Ledger Technologies, 2023.
Jayasree Sengupta, Sushmita Ruj, Sipra Das Bit. SPRITE: A Scalable Privacy-Preserving and Verifiable Collaborative Learning for Industrial IoT, IEEE/ACM CCGrid, 2022.
Philipp Hoenisch, Subhra Mazumdar, Sushmita Ruj and Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, LightSwap: An Atomic Swap Does Not Require Timeouts At Both Blockchains. Esorics Workshop, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology - ESORICS CBT 2022.

Journals

Prabal Banerjee, Subhra Mazumdar, Nishant Nikam, Sushmita Ruj, Cumulus: Blockchain-Enabled Privacy Preserving Data Audit in Cloud, ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies, 2024.
Robert Marlin, Raja Jurdak, Alsharif Abuadbba, Sushmita Ruj, Dimity Miller: Electric Vehicle Next Charge Location Prediction. IEEE Trans. Intell. Transp. Syst. 25(10): 14128-14139, 2024.
Laltu Sardar, Binanda Sengupta, Sushmita Ruj: Efficient keyword search on encrypted dynamic cloud data. Adv. Math. Commun. 18(5): 1442-1470, 2024.
Subhra Mazumdar, Prabal Banerjee, Abhinandan Sinha, Sushmita Ruj, Bimal Roy. Strategic Analysis of Griefing Attack in Lightning Network, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, 20(2): 1790-1803, 2023.
Jayashree Sengupta, Sushmita Ruj, Sipra DasBit, FairShare: Blockchain Enabled Fair, Accountable and Secure Data Sharing for Industrial IoT, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, 2023.
Prabal Banerjee, Dushyant Behl, Palanivel Kodeswaran, Chaitanya Kumar, Sushmita Ruj, Sayandeep Sen. Accelerated Verifiable Fair Digital Exchange, ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies, 2023.
Subhra Mazumdar, Sushmita Ruj. CryptoMaze: Atomic Off-Chain Payments in Payment Channel Network, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing., 2022.
Govind Singh, Ananya Shrivastava, Sushmita Ruj. A digital asset inheritance model to convey online persona posthumously, International Journal of Information Security, 2022.
Nadeem Ahmed, Regio A. Michelin, Wanli Xue, Guntur Dharma Putra, Sushmita Ruj, Salil S. Kanhere, Sanjay K. Jha. DIMY: Enabling privacy-preserving contact tracing, J. Netw. Comput. Appl., Volume 202, Issue, 10335, 2022.

My Research Supervision

Supervision keywords

classical to quantum transition

Areas of supervision

I am looking for Ph. D. students and Masters by Research students to work on interesting problems on (but not limited to) the following topics:

Applied cryptography

- Proofs of Storage

- (Verifiable ) Computation and Search on Encrypted Data

- Cryptographic Key Management

Blockchains

- Layer-2 scaling solutions

- Interoperability of Blockchains

- Decentralised Storage on Blockchains

- Attacks and defences

Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC)

- PQC from Symmetric Key primitives: Signatures, Zero-knowledge proofs

- PQC algorithms for Blockchains

- Deployment of PQC algorithms for securing the Internet

Data Privacy

- Privacy Enhancing technologies (mostly using Cryptography)

- Looking at privacy laws and regulations from the Technological lens

Applications

- Cloud Security

- Internet of Things Security and Privacy

- Industrial Internet of Things Security and Privacy

It's a long list but there are subtle connections between many of these problems. All the problems are motivated by real-world problems in emerging domains. The essence of many of these problems is proofs and verifiability. We use a wide range of tools from Data structures, Discrete Mathematics, Coding theory and Cryptography. If you have an exciting problem that you don't see in this list of topics, please share it with me and get me interested.

Prospective students should be self-motivated with a strong mathematical inclination and strong computer science background. Honesty, sincerity and perseverance are very important to me and should be a priority for the students. To know more about my work please visit my Google Scholar profile and DBLP. You are also welcome to talk to my students for their feedback. Please drop me an email (with your CV) and let me know why you are interested and what you are interested in.

If you are an undergrad or masters student at UNSW, please feel free to drop me an email to know more about the exciting work we are doing and ways to get involved. I will be happy to talk with you in person.

Currently supervising

HDR Students at UNSW, Sydney

1. Vir Pathak, Ph. D. Student at UNSW, Sydney (Primary Supervisor)

2. Nhi Nguyen, Ph. D. Student at UNSW, Sydney (Primary Supervisor)

3. Ayada Orang, Ph. D. Student at UNSW, Sydney (Jointly with Serge Gaspers)

4. Godfrey Wang, Ph. D. Student at UNSW, Sydney (secondary supervisor, primary supervisor Ron vander Meyden)

5. Evan Krul, MPhil Student, UNSW, Sydney (Jointly with Helen Paik)

Current Honours Thesis Students at UNSW, Sydney

Srija Mukherjee, Privacy preserving search on Genomic Data.

Cameron McGowan, Post Quantum Signatures.

Joseph Hilsberg, Privacy Preserving and Censorship Resistant Blockchains.

Jibitesh Saha, Efficient Data structures for ZK-Rollups.

Past Ph. D. Students

Ram Govind Singh, Thesis on Enhanced Security Approaches for Data Protection: Managing Consent, Data Breach, and Asset Inheritance, Thesis Submitted.
Prabal Banerjee, Thesis on Blockchain Enabled Data Storage. Graduated 2023. (Co-Founder, Avail, Ex-Polygon).
Subhra Mazumdar, Thesis on Payment Channel Networks. Graduated 2022. (Now Assistant Professor at IIT Indore, past Post Doc at TU Wien, Austria).
Jayasree Sengupta, Thesis on Security of Industrial IoT. Graduated 2022. (Now Post Doc at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Germany).
Laltu Sardar, Thesis on Queryable Encryption. Graduated 2021. (Now at TCG Crest, India)
Tanusree Chatterjee. Thesis on Named Data Networks, Graduated 2022. (Now Assistant Professor, MAKAUT, India)
Binanda Sengupta, Thesis title: “Proof-of-Storage Constructions for Checking Integrity of Cloud Data”, Graduated 2018. (Now Assistant Professor at IIT Dhanbad, India, Ex-A STAR, Singapore )

Past Honours Thesis Students at UNSW, Sydney

Niraj Sapkota, Packet Fragmentation in Post Quantum DNSSEC.
Hibah Ansari: Post Quantum DNSSEC.
Boqian Ma. Optimising ZK-rollups.
Kanishka Yamani, ZK Rollups for Blockchains.
Michael Agius, Building a secure Carbon Trading Platform.
Martin Tenny, Dynamic Searchable Encryption.
Edwin Tang, Post Quantum Privacy Preserving Certificate Transparency
Lanping Liu, Optimising ZK-Rollups.
Jae Jeon, Griefing attacks in Payment Channel Networks.

Taste of Research students (UG)

James Liu (2024), ZK-Rollup Optimizations
Chenlu Zhu (2023), Data Availability for Blockchains
Cameron McGowan (2022), Decentralised Storage

My Engagement

Editorship of Journals (Selected)

Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Information Security and Forensics, since November 2022.
Associate Editor, Elsevier Journal Pervasive and Mobile Computing (PMC), May 2021- May 2023.
Associate Editor, Elsevier Journal of Information Security and Applications (JISA), 2019 - May 2023.
Editorial board member, IEICE transactions on Information and Systems, June 2016- December 2019.

Conference Organisation (Selected)

Workshop Co-Chair, IEEE World Forum, Internet of Things (WF-IoT), Ottawa, Canada, 2024.
Publicity Co-Chair, IEEE ICBC, Ireland, 2023.
Publicity Co-Chair, ACM AsiaCCS, Australia, 2023.
Program Co-Chair, ACISP 2021, Perth, Australia.
Program Co-Chair, Indocrypt 2019, Hyderabad, India.
Publicity Co-Chair, IEEE ICBC, Virtual, 2021.

Program Committee Member (Selected)

IACR ACNS (2024, 2022, 2021, 2020), ACM AsiaCCS (2022, 2016), ICDCS 2021, IEEE ICBC (2020-2023), Indocrypt (2010, 2015, 2021-2023), IEEE Globecom (2012-2022), IEEE ICC (2013-2022), IEEE CNS 2020, IEEE IEEE/IFIP NOMS 2018, Secrypt 2018, IEEE Trustcom 2017, IEEE PST 2017, IEEE AINA (2017-2018), ISPEC (2018-2019), Mobiquitous (2014,2016), NSS (2016, 2022), ACISP 2016, IEEE Cloudnet (2015, 2016, 2018), etc.

Invited Talks/Panels (Selected)

Panellist, “Quantum Safe Internet and Blockchains”, Quantum Australia, Sydney, 2024. (upcoming).
“Proofs of Storage and Applications”, COMSNETS 2024, Bangalore, India, January 2024. (Invited Speaker).
Panellist, The Future of Intelligent Networking: Mobile Computing and Cyber-Physical Systems, COMSNETS 2024, Bangalore, India, January 2024.
Layer-2 Scaling for Blockchains. Symposium on Distributed Ledger Technologies, Brisbane, Australia, November 2023. (Invited Speaker)
Panellist, “Privacy-Preserving, Data Sharing and Collaboration in the Cloud”, Sydney November 2023.
Panellist on the panel “AISecurity: the view from Asia and Oceania” at DIGITALmeet, Italy. DIGITALMEET is the biggest Festival on Digital Literacy in Italy.
Panellist, “Future of Money” hosted by Algohub (of Algorand Foundation) and UNSW University Network for CryptoCurrency and Blockchain.
Moderator, “Women in Security”, ACM AsiaCCS, Melbourne, July 2023.
Panellist, “Building Trust in an Online Future”, Organised by auDA, Sydney, June 2023.
Layer-2 Scaling Solutions for Blockchains. Algorand Center For Excellence Summer School, Melbourne, February 2023. (Invited Speaker)
Panellist: Post Quantum Cryptography for Future Enterprises. (Organised by HCL Tech), November 2022.
Blockchain for Data Sharing, Blockchain In Business, Sydney, November 2022. Invited Speaker.
Panellist: Cybersecurity at UNSW, CSE 30th Anniversary, UNSW, September 2022.
Blockchain Enabled Data Marketplaces, APAC Forums Blockchain Summit, June 2022. Invited Speaker.
Tutorial: Scaling Solutions for Blockchain, IEEE ICBC, May 2022.