Christian Knabenhans

Christian Knabenhans

EPFL

About me

I’m a first-year doctoral student at EPFL, working broadly on security and privacy topics. I’m a recipient of a fellowship by EPFL’s doctoral school, and I’m splitting my first year between Alessandro Chiesa’s COMPSEC lab (working on zero-knowledge proof systems) and Carmela Troncoso’s SPRING lab (designing real-world systems to improve the security and privacy of at-risk users).

Before that, I worked on verifiable and robust Fully Homomorphic Encryption in Anwar Hithnawi’s Privacy-Preserving Systems Lab at ETH Zurich, and I hold a join Master’s in Cyber-Security form EPFL and ETH.

At the moment, I’m mainly interested in improving the state-of-the-art in Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (particularly fully homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs). During my Bachelor’s and Master’s, I’ve also worked on static analysis and formal verification and privacy issues of machine learning.

In my free time, I’m involved in the non-profits ETH Cyber Group — Student Initiative and L’Association Francophone des Étudiants de Zurich. I also fence and rant about opera.

Recent News

All news»

01 Sep 2023 I’m starting my Ph.D. at EPFL!

06 Jul 2023 I’ll be at the EPFL Summer Research Institute, and at PETS and HotPETS in Lausanne next week

29 Jun 2023 I’m giving this week’s talk at the ZISC seminar at ETH

10 May 2023 I’m giving a talk at the Stanford security seminar next Wednesday, and I’ll be presenting a poster at S&P 🇺🇸!

25 Apr 2023 I’ll be attending the Lattices meet Hashes workshop at the Bernoulli Center at EPFL 🇨🇭

Publications

(2023). Verifiable Fully Homomorphic Encryption. under submission.

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(2022). Verifiable Encodings for Secure Homomorphic Analytics. under submission.

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Talks, Demos, Posters

Integrity Protection Challenges for Real-World FHE
Poster presentation and lightning talks

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Privacy-Preserving Systems Lab at ETH Zurich
Research Assistant
Nov 2022 – Present Zurich
Investigating integrity protection for modern FHE use cases, by analyzing, improving and implementing zero-knowledge proof systems for FHE.
 
 
 
 
 
ETH Cyber Group - Student Initiative
President, Board Member for Communication and Marketing
Aug 2021 – Jul 2022 Zurich
As a student association at ETH Zurich, Cyber Group brings the topic of cyber security closer to students from all departments, and aims to create a network between students, academia, industry, and the public sector.
Cyber Group trains students teams for Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenges, and organizes bi-monthly Open Port talks, as well as its yearly Meet & Greet networking and conference event.
 
 
 
 
 
Laboratory for Data Security (Prof. Hubaux), EPFL
Student Research Assistant
Oct 2021 – Dec 2021 Lausanne
 
 
 
 
 
Laboratory for Data Security (Prof. Hubaux), EPFL
Summer@EPFL Intern
Jul 2021 – Oct 2021 Lausanne
Research internship supported by a fellowship grant
Enabling verifiable computations for fully homomorphic encryption systems.
Implementation of a new theoretical framework using the open-source Lattigo library.
 
 
 
 
 
Security and Privacy Engineering Laboratory (Prof. Troncoso), EPFL
Student Research Assistant
Jun 2021 – Jul 2021 Lausanne
Developed and implemented a framework to predict and quantify property inference attacks in deep machine learning models (particularly in the context of federated learning), using measures of distance between machine learning tasks (derived using transfer learning)
 
 
 
 
 
Airlock, Ergon Informatik AG
Security Intern
Aug 2018 – Dec 2018 Zurich
Searched for vulnerabilities in the Airlock Web Application Firewall filter rules using automated fuzzing
Patched, extended and optimized filter rules for XSS, SQLi, and multipart attacks
Helped set up a Bug Bounty program