Senior Lecturer
Dr Sushmita Ruj
Engineering
Computer Science and Engineering
Faculty of Engineering Lead, IfCyber
I am the Faculty of Engineering Lead, UNSW Institute for Cybersecurity, IFCYBER and Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW, 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.
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 80 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 Elsevier Journal Pervasive and Mobile Computing (PMC) and Elsevier Journal of Information Security and Applications (JISA). I have served as 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, 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 as 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) and Assistant and Associate Professor at Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. I started my academic career as an Assistant Professor at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indore.
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. Many years ago, 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 famous 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
Phone
+61 2 9348 0960
E-mail
Location
School of Computer Science and Engineering
Building K17
University of New South Wales, Sydney
Kensington, NSW 2052
Australia
- Publications
- Media
- Grants
- Awards
- Research Activities
- Engagement
- Teaching and Supervision
Selected Grants:
- 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.
- 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.
Applied Cryptography, Post Quantum Cryptography, Blockchains, Data privacy, Cybersecurity.
Recent Selected Publications:
Conference
- 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. (Accepted).
- 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 - CBT 2022.
Journals
- 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. (Accepted)
- Prabal Banerjee, Dushyant Behl, Palanivel Kodeswaran, Chaitanya Kumar, Sushmita Ruj, Sayandeep Sen. Accelerated Verifiable Fair Digital Exchange, ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies, 2023. (Accepted).
- 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
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
1. Niraj Sapkota, Packet Fragmentation in Post Quantum DNSSEC.
2. Hibah Ansari: Post Quantum DNSSEC.
3. Boqian Ma. Optimising ZK-rollups.
4. Kanishka Yamani, ZK Rollups for Blockchains.
5. Michael Agius, Building a secure Carbon Trading Platform.
6. Martin Tenny, Dynamic Searchable Encryption.
7. Srija Mukherjee, Privacy preserving search on Genomic Data.
Past Ph. D. Students
1. Prabal Banerjee, Thesis on Blockchain Enabled Data Storage. (Co-Founder, Avail, Ex-Polygon). Thesis to be submitted in August 2023.
2. Subhra Mazumdar, Thesis on Payment Channel Networks. Graduated 2022. (Now Post Doc at TU Wien, Austria).
3. Jayasree Sengupta, Thesis on Security of Industrial IoT. Graduated 2022. (Now Post Doc at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Germany).
4. Laltu Sardar, Thesis on Queryable Encryption. Graduated 2021. (Now at TCG Crest, India)
5. Tanusree Chatterjee. Thesis on Named Data Networks, Graduated 2022. (Now Assistant Professor, MAKAUT, India)
6. 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 )
My Teaching
COMP2521 Data Structure and Algorithms
ZZEN9201 Foundations of Cybersecurity
ZZEN9214 Cloud Security