Simone Colombo's website

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Cybersecurity group at King's College London working on the social foundations of cryptography with Martin R. Albrecht and Ben Dowling.
I completed my PhD at EPFL under the supervision of Bryan Ford in the DEDIS group.

My email address is firstname.lastname@kcl.ac.uk. For secure communication, I’m happy to connect on Signal.

Publications

  1. TRIP: Coercion-resistant Registration for E-Voting with Verifiability and Usability in Votegral
    Louis-Henri Merino, Simone Colombo, Rene Reyes, Alaleh Azhir, Shailesh Mishra, Pasindu Tennage, Mohammad Amin Raeisi, Haoqian Zhang, Jeff Allen, Bernhard Tellenbach, Vero Estrada-Galiñanes, Bryan Ford
    SOSP 2025
    [full version] [conference version]
  2. (Im)Possibility of Symmetric Encryption against Coordinated Algorithm Substitution Attacks and Key Exfiltration
    Simone Colombo, Damian Vizár
    Latincrypt 2025
    [full version] [conference version]
  3. Towards Leakage-Resilient Ratcheted Key Exchange
    Daniel Collins, Simone Colombo, Sina Schaeffler
    PKC 2025
    [full version] [conference version]
  4. Real-World Deniability in Messaging
    Daniel Collins, Simone Colombo, Loïs Huguenin-Dumittan
    PETS 2025, preliminary version presented at RWC 2023
    [preliminary version] [full version] [conference version]
  5. E-Vote Your Conscience: Perceptions of Coercion and Vote Buying, and the Usability of Fake Credentials in Online Voting
    Louis-Henri Merino, Alaleh Azhir, Haoqian Zhang, Simone Colombo, Bernhard Tellenbach, Vero Estrada-Galiñanes, Bryan Ford
    IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2024
    [full version] [conference version]
  6. On Active Attack Detection in Messaging with Immediate Decryption
    Khashayar Barooti, Daniel Collins, Simone Colombo, Loïs Huguenin-Dumittan, Serge Vaudenay
    CRYPTO 2023
    [full version] [conference version]
  7. Authenticated private information retrieval
    Simone Colombo, Kirill Nikitin, Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, David J. Wu, Bryan Ford
    USENIX Security 2023
    [full version] [conference version] [code] [talk] [slides] [demo]

Talks

  1. (Im)Possibility of Symmetric Encryption against Coordinated Algorithm Substitution Attacks and Key Exfiltration
    Latincrypt, October 2025 [slides]
  2. Real-World Deniability in Messaging
    PETS, July 2025 [slides]
  3. Beyond the ratchet: practical challenges in secure messaging
    Università della Svizzera italiana, June 2025
    Dissertation talk, February 2025
  4. Authenticated private information retrieval
    USENIX Security, August 2023 [video] [slides]
    MIT CSAIL Security Seminar, May 2023
    NYU Crypto Reading Group, May 2023

Miscellaneous