Sushmita Ruj

Faculty of Engineering Lead, UNSW Institute for Cybersecurity and Program Director of Masters of Cybersecurity Program (UNSW Life Long Learning). I am the Faculty of Engineering Lead, UNSW Institute for Cybersecurity, IFCYBER and Associate Professor (equivalent to US Full Professor) in the School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), UNSW, Sydney. Recently, I have taken the role of Program Director of Masters of Cybersecurity Program (Online). 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 (PQC), cybersecurity, blockchains and data privacy. Currently, most of my research is towards PQC. I design practical, efficient and provably secure protocols that can be deployed in real-life applications. My interests are in designing (PQ) Digital/Anonymnous Credential Systems, (PQ) Secure Blockchain protocols and (PQ) Communication and Network Protocols. 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 100 technical lectures around the world. I have won several competitive grants like Australian Research Council (ARC) grants, Grant from the Office of National Intelligence, Australia, Defence Trailblazer grant, Samsung GRO Award, NetApp Faculty Fellowship, Cisco Academic Grant and IBM Research grant. I am a senior member of ACM and IEEE. I am an expert on the ISO TC 307 on Blockchains and Digital Ledger Technology. I have served on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), Elsevier Journal Pervasive and Mobile Computing (PMC) and Elsevier Journal of Information Security and Applications (JISA). I also served as Program Co- Chairs for ACISP 2021 and Indocrypt 2020. Besides, I have been serving on the program committees of many conferences like ACM ASIACCS, ACNS, PETS, ICDCS, Indocrypt, 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 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 UNSW, 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 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). 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. 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, planned, quiet Indian city known 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 Cryptography, Privacy, Post-Quantum Cryptography, Blockchains, Digital Identity, Biometrics, Age verification, Data Breach, Data Privacy, Internet of Things Security, Cloud Security

Recent (since 2022) Selected Publications: Conference - Vir Pathak, Sushmita Ruj, A Post Quantum Vector Commitment Scheme with Efficient Insertions and Deletions, ACNS 2026. - Nhi Nguyen, Asish Balasundaram and Sushmita Ruj, SOLSTICE: Optimising Verifiable Data Retrieval for Storage Nodes in Account-based Blockchains, 40th IFIP DBSec, 2026. - Nhi Nguyen, Vir Pathak, James Liu, Zhengnan Hua, Joseph Hilsberg, Sushmita Ruj, Data Inclusion Proofs for Account-based Blockchains Storage Nodes, IEEE ICBC 2026. (Poster) - Cameron McGowan, James Liu, Sushmita Ruj, Security Considerations for Post-Quantum Signatures in DNSSEC via Request-Based Fragmentation, ACM WWW 2025. - Minghao Cai, Sushmita Ruj, Rahat, Masood, Salil Kanhere, Empirical Analysis of DNS Abuse Cases Within Australian Domain, IEE