Marloes Venema

As of March 2023, I am a postdoctoral researcher in the research group of prof. dr. Tibor Jager in the IT Security and Cryptography Group at the University of Wuppertal. Before this, I was a PhD student under supervision of dr. Greg Alpár in the Digital Security group at the Institute for Computing and Information Sciences of the Radboud University Nijmegen. I defended my thesis titled "Attaining Basically Everything in Attribute-Based Encryption: Simplifying the Design of Practical Schemes via Pair Encodings" on Tuesday 19 September 2023. Before my PhD, I obtained a master's degree in Computing Science (specialization: Cyber Security), and a bachelor's degree in Mathematics (with a minor in Computing Science), both at the Radboud University as well. 

I am particularly interested in the theoretical design and analysis of various cryptographic primitives, with the aim to make schemes practical enough for specific real-world settings. I have mostly conducted research in predicate encryption, most notably pairing-based attribute-based encryption and identity-based encryption, and hybrid encryption, including multi-recipient schemes. I am also interested in other cryptographic primitives, including but certainly not limited to proxy re-encryption, threshold cryptography, secure multiparty computation, secure combinations of multiple primitives, homomorphic encryption, authenticated key exchange, post-quantum cryptography, etc.

Academic publications

• Antonio de la Piedra, Marloes Venema, and Greg Alpár, "ACABELLA: Automated (Crypt)analysis of Attribute-Based Encryption Leveraging Linear Algebra", in ACM CCS 2023, pp. 3269-3283, 2023.
  
• Watson Ladd, Tanya Verma, Marloes Venema, Armando Faz-Hernández, Brendan McMillion, Avani Wildani, and Nick Sullivan, "Portunus: Re-imagining Access Control in Distributed Systems", in USENIX ATC 2023, pp. 35-52, 2023.
  
• Leon Botros, Merel Brandon, Bart Jacobs, Daniel Ostkamp, Hanna Schraffenberger, and Marloes Venema, "PostGuard: Towards easy and secure email communication", in Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '23), 2023.
  
• Marloes Venema, and Greg Alpár, "GLUE: Generalizing Unbounded Attribute-Based Encryption for Flexible Efficiency Trade-Offs", in PKC 2023, pp. 652-682, Springer, 2023.
  
• Marloes Venema, "A Practical Compiler for Attribute-Based Encryption: New Decentralized Constructions and More" , in CT-RSA 2023, pp. 132-159, Springer, 2023.
  
• Marloes Venema, Greg Alpár, and Jaap-Henk Hoepman, "Systematizing Core Properties of Pairing-Based Attribute-Based Encryption to Uncover Remaining Challenges in Enforcing Access Control in Practice", in Designs, Codes and Cryptography 91(1), pp. 165-220, 2023.
  
• Marloes Venema, and Greg Alpár, "TinyABE: Unrestricted Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption for Embedded Devices and Low-Quality Networks", in AFRICACRYPT 2022, pp. 103-129, Springer, 2022.
  
• Antonio de la Piedra, Marloes Venema, and Greg Alpár, "ABE Squared: Accurately Benchmarking Efficiency of Attribute-Based Encryption", in TCHES 2022(2), pp. 192-239, 2022.
  
• Marloes Venema, and Greg Alpár, "A Bunch of Broken Schemes: A Simple yet Powerful Linear Approach to Analyzing Security of Attribute-Based Encryption", in CT-RSA 2021, pp. 100-125, Springer, 2021.
  

Preprints and other publications

• Antonio de la Piedra, Marloes Venema, and Greg Alpár, "ACABELLA: Automated (Crypt)analysis of Attribute-Based Encryption Leveraging Linear Algebra", in IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2023/1274, 2023, available at: https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1274, [code], [web application]
  
• Marloes Venema, "A Practical Compiler for Attribute-Based Encryption: New Decentralized Constructions and More", in IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2023/143, 2023, available at: https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/143
  
• Watson Ladd, Marloes Venema, and Tanya Verma, "Portunus: Re-imagining Access Control in Distributed Systems", in IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2023/094, 2023, available at: https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/094, [code], [Tanya's blog post], [RWC2023 talk]
• Marloes Venema, and Leon Botros, "Efficient and Generic Transformations for Chosen-Ciphertext Secure Predicate Encryption", in IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2022/1436, 2022, available at: https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1436, [code]
  
• Marloes Venema, and Greg Alpár, "GLUE: Generalizing Unbounded Attribute-Based Encryption for Flexible Efficiency Trade-Offs", in IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2022/613, 2022, available at: https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/613, [code]
  
• Marloes Venema, and Greg Alpár, "TinyABE: Unrestricted Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption for Embedded Devices and Low-Quality Networks", in IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2022/569, 2022, available at: https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/569, [code]
  
• Antonio de la Piedra, Marloes Venema, and Greg Alpár, "ABE Squared: Accurately Benchmarking Efficiency of Attribute-Based Encryption", in IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2022/038, 2022, available at: https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/038, [code], [talk]
  
• Antonio de la Piedra, and Marloes Venema, "Practical Attacks Against Attribute-based Encryption", at Black Hat Europe, London, 8-11 November 2021, available at: [abstract], [code], [Antonio's blog post]
  
• Marloes Venema, Greg Alpár, and Jaap-Henk Hoepman, "Systematizing Core Properties of Pairing-Based Attribute-Based Encryption to Uncover Remaining Challenges in Enforcing Access Control in Practice", in IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2021/1172, 2021, available at: https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1172
• Marloes Venema, and Greg Alpár, "A Bunch of Broken Schemes: A Simple yet Powerful Linear Approach to Analyzing Security of Attribute-Based Encryption", in IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2020/460, 2020, available at: https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/460
  

Teaching

At the University of Wuppertal:

• Summer semester 2024:
  Provable Security - lecturer
• Winter semester 2023-2024:
  Theoretical Foundations of Applied Cryptography - teaching assistant
• Summer semester 2023:
  Provable Security - lecturer

At Radboud University:

• Spring 2021:
  Introduction to Cryptography (IBC023) - teaching assistant
• February-November 2020:
  Master thesis by Wouter de Boer on "Secure Computation on the SAP Cloud Platform" - co-supervisor with Joan Daemen and Aslı Bay
  
• Spring 2020:
  Introduction to Cryptography (IBC023) - teaching assistant
• Fall 2019:
  Introduction to Formal Reasoning (IPK001) - teaching assistant
• Spring 2019:
  Introduction to Cryptography (IBC023) - teaching assistant
• Fall 2018:
  Introduction to Formal Reasoning (IPK001) - teaching assistant

Reviewing

I served as an external reviewer and PC member for several conferences and journals. As a PC member:

• ISC 2024
  
• CT-RSA 2024
  
• ESORICS 2023

As an external reviewer:

• CRYPTO 2020, 2024
• ACNS 2024
  
• EUROCRYPT 2020, 2023, 2024
  
• PKC 2024
  
• ISC 2023
  
• TCC 2023
• ASIACRYPT 2023
• Designs, Codes and Cryptography 2023
• Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing 2023
• ACM-CCS 2023
• IEEE-S&P 2023
• AFRICACRYPT 2019, 2022, 2023
  
• Journal of Cryptographic Engineering 2022
• EuroS&P 2021
• NDSS 2020, 2021

Master thesis

I wrote my master thesis about Decentralized Attribute-Based Encryption for DECODE under supervision of Jaap-Henk Hoepman in the period from February to August 2018.

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