Associate Professor Sushmita Ruj
Faculty of Engineering Lead, IfCyber
I am the 听Faculty of Engineering Lead, 麻豆社madou Institute for Cybersecurity, IFCYBER and听Associate Professor (equivalent to US Full Professor) 听in the School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), 麻豆社madou, Sydney. I am also the Taste of Research (ToR) Coordinator within CSE. This is a unique program which aims to introduce undergraduate students to research, steer them towards innovation and creative thinking and possibly pursue a higher degree or career in research.听
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 and legal and regulatory aspects around data sharing.听
My aim is to carry out impactful research for the benefit of the society and mentor students to be critical thinkers and leaders. 听 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 Australian Research Council (ARC) grants, Samsung GRO Award, NetApp Faculty Fellowship, Cisco Academic Grant and IBM Research grant. I am a senior member of ACM and IEEE.听
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 鈥淏lockchain For Cybersecurity鈥 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 麻豆社madou, 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 听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).听
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. 听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.听
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:听
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- Publications
- Media
- Grants
- Awards
- Research Activities
- Engagement
- Teaching and Supervision
Selected Grants:听
- Chief Investigator: 听"Blockchain Based Quantum Safe for Secure Digital Medical Passport", ARC Linkage Project, 2025-2028.听
- Lead Chief Investigator: "Embedding Trust in Digital IDs for Consumers", Trustworthy Digital Society, 2025-2026.听
- Chief Investigator: "Resilience of Supply Chain Unstructured Data", Defence Trailblazer Grant with Guardware Australia, 2025-2028.听
- Lead Chief Investigator: "Transition to Quantum Safe Technologies: Technical and Legal Challenges", 2024-2025.听
- Lead Chief Investigator: "Analysing DNS Abuse in .au Domains", auDA, 2023-2024.听
- Lead听Chief Investigator,听鈥淧rivacy and Verifiability for Responsible Technologies鈥, Global Research and Innovation Program (GRIP), 麻豆社madou, 2023-2024.听
- Chief Investigator:听鈥淭rusted Automation for Industrial Internet of Things鈥, CSIRO Next Generation Graduates Program (QUT-麻豆社madou Collaboration), 2022-2027.听
- Lead Chief Investigator: Security and Privacy of Blockchain Enabled Carbon Trading Platforms. Center for Critical Digital Infrastructure, 麻豆社madou, Sydney, 2022.听
- 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, 麻豆社madou, Sydney, 2022-2023. 听
- Project Lead, 鈥淎utomatic Assessment and Protection of Personal Information for Data Sharing鈥,听Cyber Security CRC, WA, Government, NSW Government and Australian Computer听Society. 2020-2022.
- Chief Investigator, 鈥淒ata61 CRP43 - Novel security solutions in the context of AI and potential quantum supremacy鈥, 2020-2023.
- Chief Investigator,听听鈥 Securing Cloud Storage鈥, Funding Agency, Cisco, Inc, USA, 2017 - 2019.
-听Chief Investigator, 鈥淎uditing Schemes for Cloud Storage鈥. Funding agency, NetApp Inc, USA. 2016 -2019.
-听Chief Investigator, 鈥淪tudy on Security and Privacy of Internet of Things (IoT)鈥. Funding agency, Samsung听Electronics, Korea, 听2014-2016.
-Chief Investigator听(India Side), 鈥淐omputational Aspects of Mathematical Design and Analysis of Secure听Communication Systems Based on Cryptographic Primitives鈥, Indo-Japan Cooperative Science听Program. Funding Agency DST, Govt. of India and JSPS, Japan. 2014-2016.听
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JNCA Best Survey Award for the paper "A comprehensive survey on attacks, security issues and blockchain solutions for IoT and IIoT", Elsevier听Journal of Network and Computer Applications, December 2023.听
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NSW Innovation Award (iAward) Merit Winner, 2022 (Awarded to project on Personal Information Assessment and Protection, led at CSIRO)听
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Women in Science Award CSIRO (SCS, Data61), June 2020.
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WIE Best Paper award in IEEE ANTS, December, 2017.
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Cisco Academic Research Grant, March 2017.
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University Partner (CI), Open Collaborative Science Project (OCSP) Program with IBM Research on Blockchains, February 2017.
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ACM Senior Member, 2016.
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NetApp faculty fellowship, 2016.
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Selected for Japan Trust International Research Collaboration Program. Collaborated with KDDI R&D Labs, Japan. (April-June 2016).
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IEEE Senior Member, 2015.
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Samsung GRO award, 2014.
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Finalist for (Indian National Science Academy) INSA Young Scientist Award 2014.
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Best Paper Award at 22nd IEEE PIMRC, 2011.
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Best Paper Award at The Fifth International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing and Applications, ISPA07, 2007.
Applied Cryptography, Post Quantum Cryptography, Blockchains, Data privacy, Cybersecurity.听
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Recent (since 2022) Selected Publications:听
Conference
- Cameron McGowan, James Liu, Sushmita Ruj,听Security Considerations for Post-Quantum Signatures in DNSSEC via Request-Based Fragmentation, ACM WWW 2025.听
- Xinyu听Zhang, Ron Steinfeld, Muhammed听Esgin, Joseph听Liu, Dongxi听Liu, Sushmita听Ruj,听Loquat: A SNARK-Friendly Post-Quantum Signature based on the Legendre PRF with Applications in Ring and Aggregate Signatures, IACR Crypto 2024.听
- Evan Krul, Helen Paik, Sushmita Ruj, Salil Kanhere, SOK:听Trusting Self-Sovereign Identity, Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, PETS, 2024.听
- 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听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听2023.听
- 听Boqian Ma, Vir Pathak, Lanping Liu and Sushmita Ruj,听One-Phase Batch Update on Sparse Merkle Trees for Rollups, Symposium on Digital Ledger Technologies, 2023.听
- 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.
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Journals
- Prabal Banerjee, Subhra Mazumdar, Nishant Nikam, Sushmita Ruj,听Cumulus: Blockchain-Enabled Privacy Preserving Data Audit in Cloud, ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies, 2024.听
- Robert Marlin, Raja Jurdak, Alsharif Abuadbba, Sushmita Ruj, Dimity Miller:听Electric Vehicle Next Charge Location Prediction. IEEE Trans. Intell. Transp. Syst. 25(10): 14128-14139,听2024.听
- Laltu Sardar, Binanda Sengupta, Sushmita Ruj:听Efficient keyword search on encrypted dynamic cloud data. Adv. Math. Commun. 18(5): 1442-1470,听2024.听
- 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.听
- 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.
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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), 听2019 - May 2023.
- Editorial board member, IEICE transactions on Information and Systems, June 2016- December 2019.
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Conference Organisation听(Selected)
- Workshop Co-Chair, IEEE World Forum, Internet of Things (WF-IoT), Ottawa, Canada, 2024.听
- 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.
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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), 听Mobiquitous (2014,2016), NSS (2016, 2022), ACISP 2016, IEEE Cloudnet (2015, 2016, 2018), etc.
Invited Talks/Panels (Selected)
- Panellist, 鈥淨uantum Safe Internet and Blockchains鈥, Quantum Australia, Sydney, 2024. (upcoming).
- 鈥淧roofs of Storage and Applications鈥, 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, 鈥淧rivacy-Preserving, Data Sharing and Collaboration in the Cloud鈥, Sydney November 2023.
- Panellist on the panel 鈥淎ISecurity: the view from Asia and Oceania鈥 at DIGITALmeet, Italy. DIGITALMEET is the biggest Festival on Digital Literacy in Italy.
- Panellist, 鈥淔uture of Money鈥 hosted by Algohub (of Algorand Foundation) and 麻豆社madou University Network for CryptoCurrency and Blockchain.
- Moderator, 鈥淲omen in Security鈥, ACM AsiaCCS, Melbourne, July 2023.
- Panellist, 鈥淏uilding Trust in an Online Future鈥, 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 麻豆社madou, CSE 30th Anniversary, 麻豆社madou, September 2022.
- Blockchain Enabled Data Marketplaces, APAC Forums Blockchain Summit, June 2022. Invited Speaker.
- Tutorial: Scaling Solutions for Blockchain, IEEE ICBC, May 2022.听
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My Research Supervision
HDR Students at 麻豆社madou, Sydney
1. Nhi Nguyen, Ph. D. Student at 麻豆社madou, Sydney听
2. Evan Krul, Ph. D. 听Student, 麻豆社madou, Sydney
3. Vir Pathak, M.Phil Student 听at 麻豆社madou, Sydney听
4. Godfrey Wang, Ph. D. Student at 麻豆社madou, Sydney听
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Current Honours Thesis Students at 麻豆社madou, Sydney
Srija Mukherjee, Privacy preserving search on Genomic Data.
Cameron McGowan, Post Quantum Signatures.听
Joseph Hilsberg, Privacy Preserving and Censorship Resistant Blockchains.听
Jibitesh Saha, Efficient Data structures for ZK-Rollups.
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Past Ph. D. Students
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- Ayda Orang, 听Decentralized Task Allocation:听Fair, Private, and Secure (Now at Transport for NSW)听
- Ram Govind Singh, Thesis on听Enhanced Security Approaches for Data Protection: Managing Consent, Data Breach, and Asset Inheritance.听
- Prabal Banerjee, 听Thesis on Blockchain Enabled Data Storage. Graduated听2023. (Co-Founder, Avail, Ex-Polygon).
- Subhra Mazumdar, Thesis on Payment Channel Networks. Graduated 2022. (Now Assistant Professor at IIT Indore, past听Post Doc at TU Wien, Austria).
- Jayasree Sengupta, 听Thesis on Security of Industrial IoT. Graduated 2022. (Now Post Doc at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Germany).
- Laltu Sardar, 听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, 听Thesis title: 鈥淧roof-of-Storage Constructions for Checking Integrity of Cloud Data鈥, Graduated 2018. (Now Assistant Professor at IIT Dhanbad, India, Ex-A STAR, Singapore )
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Past Honours Thesis Students at 麻豆社madou, 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听Networks.听
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Taste of Research听students (UG)
- James Liu (2024), ZK-Rollup Optimizations
- Chenlu Zhu (2023), Data Availability for Blockchains
- Cameron McGowan (2022), Decentralised Storage听
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My Teaching
COMP2521 Data Structure and Algorithms听
COMP6453 Applied Cryptography
ZZEN9201 Foundations of Cybersecurity
ZZEN9214 Cloud Security听
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