Running Projects


European Research Council, 2020-2025
ERC Starting Grants with funding of up to €1.5M over five years are awarded to researchers with two to seven years of experience since completion of the PhD and a scientific track record showing great promise.
Users of Internet services currently have to entrust the respective service provider with their data. However, attackers or secret services can obtain access to that data by using vulnerabilities or backdoors in hard- or software. Moreover, authorities can force the service provider to give out data. The new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) now mandates that companies take appropriate measures to protect user data.
The ERC Starting Grant „PSOTI“ (Privacy-preserving Services On The Internet) will eliminate the need to trust a single service provider in Internet Services and empower users to keep full control over their data. For this, the user can choose from multiple service providers who jointly process the data, without gaining direct access to the contents. The data will be protected, as long as at least one provider is trustworthy.
The main goal of PSOTI is to develop privacy-preserving services for commonly used applications on the Internet like data storage, online surveys, and email. These services will provide extensive functionalities and will allow to securely and efficiently store, retrieve, search, and process data. This will allow to comply with the GDPR and preserve the fundamental rights to privacy and the protection of personal data.
A practical system for secure multi-party computations will be developed which can also be used for the secure processing of other sensitive data such as in the areas of genomics or machine learning. Also protocols for private search queries will be built that even hide the structure of the query and that can be used in multiple application scenarios.
See also the official as well as the fact sheet and the press releases by TU Darmstadt. ERC


Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), 2014-2026
Collaborative Research Centers (Sonderforschungsbereiche) are institutions funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and are established at universities to pursue a scientifically ambitious, complex, long-term research program. The goal of the center is to provide cryptography-based security solutions enabling trust in new and next generation computing environments. The solutions will meet the efficiency and security requirements of the new environments and will have sound implementations. They will be easy to use for developers, administrators, and end users of IT, even if they are not cryptography experts. In CROSSING researchers from different areas such as cryptography, IT security, computing hardware, quantum physics, and software engineering will collaborate. In the first funding phase (2014-2018) of CROSSING, our group was involved in project CROSSING – Cryptography-Based Security Solutions: Enabling Trust in New and Next Generation Computing Environments and project S5 (Privacy-Preserving Computation). In the second funding phase (2018-2022), both projects were merged into project E4 (Compiler for Privacy-Preserving Protocols). In the third funding phase (2022-2026), we continue with project E4 (Compiler for Privacy-Preserving Protocols) and are affiliated with the new project E4 (Compiler for Privacy-Preserving Protocols). E7 (Transparency as User-Centered Intervention for Privacy and Security)


Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), 2019-2024
The Doctoral College “” is a Research Training Group (RTG) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). It is a highly interdisciplinary collaboration between Computer Science and the fields of Law, Economics, Sociology, and usability research. Mobile information and communication technology has become virtually ubiquitous due to the proliferation of smartphones and tablet computers; large sections of the society use it to their advantage. In reference to the relationship users-network, public debates highlight the increasing transparency of users (in the sense of a surveillance society) while the network is deemed to become increasingly nontransparent, i.e. inscrutable. The RTG focuses on major contributions to reversing this trend: It shall enable better privacy protection for users and better transparency, i.e., assessability of the network; Privacy protection shall be customizable to personal interests yet manageable by the lay person; Privacy-opposing economic or societal interests shall be better reconciled. The Privacy and Trust for Mobile Users is involved in research area A (Privacy and Trust in Service Networks). ENCRYPTO group