Research

Contents

• Publications
• Preprints
• Standardisation documents
• Invited talks
• Invited talks
• Program committees
• Internships and research visits

Publications

• Practical Semi-Open Chat Groups for Secure Messaging Applications (To appear in PoPETS 2026) Alex Davidson, Luiza Soezima, Fernando Virdia
• ZK-APEX: Zero-Knowledge Approximate Personalized Unlearning with Executable Proofs (To appear at MLSys 2026) Mohammad M Maheri, Sunil Cotterill, Alex Davidson, Hamed Haddadi
• Practice-Oriented Instances of Deterministic LPN (To appear at ACNS 2026) Carlos Cid, Alex Davidson, Atharva Phanse
• Pool: A Practical OT-based OPRF from Learning with Rounding (ACM CCS 2025) Alex Davidson, Amit Deo, Louis Tremblay Thibault
• TeleSparse: Practical Privacy-Preserving Verification of Deep Neural Networks (PoPETS 2025) Mohammad M Maheri, Hamed Haddadi, Alex Davidson
• [Distinguished Paper Award] DiStefano: Decentralized Infrastructure for Sharing Trusted Encrypted Facts and Nothing More (NDSS 2025) Sofía Celi, Alex Davidson, Hamed Haddadi, Gonçalo Pestana, Joe Rowell
• Call Me By My Name: Simple, Practical Private Information Retrieval for Keyword Queries (ACM CCS 2024) Sofía Celi, Alex Davidson
• Crypto Dark Matter on the Torus: Oblivious PRFs from shallow PRFs and FHE (IACR Eurocrypt 2024) Martin R. Albrecht, Alex Davidson, Amit Deo, Daniel Gardham
• FrodoPIR: Simple, Scalable, Single-Server Private Information Retrieval (PoPETS 2023, Issue 1) Alex Davidson, Gonçalo Pestana, Sofía Celi
• Tango or Square Dance? How Tightly Should we Integrate Network Functionality in Browsers? (ACM HotNets 2022) Alex Davidson, Matthias Frei, Marten Gartner, Hamed Haddadi, Jordi Subirà Nieto, Adrian Perrig, Philipp Winter, François Wirz
• [Distinguished Paper Award] STAR: Distributed Secret Sharing for Private Threshold Aggregation Reporting (ACM CCS 2022) Alex Davidson, Peter Snyder, E. B. Quirk, Joseph Genereux, Benjamin Livshits
• Let The Right One In: Attestation as a Usable CAPTCHA Alternative (SOUPS 2022) Tara Whalen, Thibault Meunier, Mrudula Kodali, Alex Davidson, Marwan Fayed, Armando Faz-Hernández, Watson Ladd, Deepak Maram, Nick Sullivan, Benedikt Christoph Wolters, Maxime Guerreiro, Andrew Galloni
• Round-optimal Verifiable Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions From Ideal Lattices (IACR PKC 2021) Martin R. Albrecht, Alex Davidson, Amit Deo, Nigel P. Smart
• Adaptively Secure Constrained Pseudorandom Functions in the Standard Model (CRYPTO 2020) Alex Davidson, Shuichi Katsumata, Ryo Nishimaki, Shota Yamada, Takashi Yamakawa
• Strong Post-Compromise Secure Proxy Re-Encryption (ACISP 2019) Alex Davidson, Amit Deo, Ela Lee, Keith Martin
• A Bit-fixing PRF with O(1) Collusion-resistance from LWE (EPRINT 2018) Alex Davidson, Ryo Nishimaki
• Estimate all the {LWE, NTRU} schemes! (SCN 2018) Martin R. Albrecht, Benjamin R. Curtis, Amit Deo, Alex Davidson, Rachel Player, Eamonn W. Postlethwaite, Fernando Virdia, Thomas Wunderer
• [Andreas Pfitzmann Best Student Paper Award] Privacy Pass: Bypassing Internet Challenges Anonymously (PETS 2018) Alex Davidson, Ian Goldberg, Nick Sullivan, George Tankersley, Filippo Valsorda
• Notes on GGH13 without ideals (IMACC 2017) Martin Albrecht, Alex Davidson, Enrique Larraia
• An Efficient Toolkit for Computing Private Set Operations (ACISP 2017), Alex Davidson and Carlos Cid
• A Model for Secure and Mutually Beneficial Software Vulnerability Sharing (WISCS@CCS16) Alex Davidson, Gregory Fenn, Carlos Cid

Preprints

• A Framework for Building Secure, Scalable, Networked Enclaves (arxiv 2022) Philipp Winter, Ralph Giles, Alex Davidson, Gonçalo Pestana
• PrivateFetch: Scalable Catalog Delivery in Privacy-Preserving Advertising (arxiv 2021) Muhammad Haris Mughees, Gonçalo Pestana, Alex Davidson, Benjamin Livshits
• A Bit-fixing PRF with O(1) Collusion-resistance from LWE (IACR eprint 2018) Alex Davidson, Ryo Nishimaki

Standardisation documents

• RFC 9497: Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions (OPRFs) using Prime-Order Groups (IRTF CFRG)
• RFC 9578: Privacy Pass Issuance Protocol (IETF privacypass), status: WG draft
• RFC 9576: Privacy Pass Architecture (IETF privacypass), status: WG draft
• Key Consistency and Discovery (IETF privacypass), status: WG draft
• STAR: Distributed Secret Sharing for Private Threshold Aggregation Reporting (IETF PPM), status: draft

Funding

• Fully-Homomorphic Encryption from Post-Quantum Code Based Assumptions Fundação da Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), CMU Portugal Program
• CertiCoLab: Collaborative Laboratory for Investigating Certifiable Computation EEA Grants Portugal

Selected invited talks

• CNCS C-Days 2025: "The path to the post-quantum transition: discussing quantum-safe cryptography"
• CNCS C-Days 2024: "Challenges and Future Innovations in Privacy-Preserving Data Analysis"
• Latincrypt 2023: "Private Information Retrieval"
• PQNet November 2022 Panel: "Beyond post-quantum signatures and KEMs: zero knowledge, OPRF and threshold"
• London-ish Crypto Day 2022: "STAR: Low-Cost Private Analytics for Everyone"
• IETF113 Privacy-Preserving Measurements Working Group: "STAR: Distributed Secret Sharing for Private Threshold Aggregation Reporting"
• ACAS Workshop @ IACR Crypto 2020: "Standardizing Anonymous Authorization for the Internet"
• IETF107 PrivacyPass BoF meeting: "Privacy Pass Protocol & Architecture"
• Tokyo Crypto Day 2018: "Notes On GGH13 Without The Presence Of Ideals"

Program committees

• ACM CCS 2026
• Euro S&P 2026
• AsiaCCS 2026
• PoPETS 2026
• ACM CCS 2025
• IACR Eurocrypt 2025
• PoPETS 2025
• ACM CCS 2024
• PoPETS 2024
• IMACC 2023
• IMACC 2019

Internships

• NTT Musashino R+D; visited Ryo Nishimaki (Feb - May 2018)
• Cloudflare; crypto team (Jul - Oct 2017)
• Cloudflare; crypto team (Jun - Sep 2016)