Christian Weinert

Christian Weinert is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Security at Royal Holloway, University of London. Before, he was a postdoctoral researcher (2021/09 – 2022/02) and doctoral researcher (2016/09 – 2021/08) in the Cryptography and Privacy Engineering Group (ENCRYPTO) at TU Darmstadt.

His research area is privacy-enhancing cryptography with a focus on applications such as private set operations, private information retrieval, federated learning, and AI/ML inference. During his bachelor and master studies, he worked in the area of secure long-term archiving.

Christian is recognised as a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

Contact

[email protected]

Administrative Responsibilities

• Director, Cryptography Group
• Chair, PGT School Progression and Awards Board (SPAB)
• Deputy Chair, PGT Departmental Assessment Board (DAB)

Teaching

• IY4500/IY3821 - MSci/BSc Project (Supervisor)
• IY5500/IY5510 - MSc Project (Supervisor)
• IY5614 - Advanced Cryptography for Privacy-Preserving Computation (Module Leader, from AY27/28)
• IY5618 - AI Security (Module Leader, from AY26/27)
• "Crypto Chats" - Advanced Cryptography Seminar (Organizer)
• CYM090 - Information Privacy (Module Leader)

PC Memberships

• Current: USENIX Security 2026, ACM CCS 2026, NeurIPS 2026, SSR 2026
• Past: IEEE SaTML 2026, SSR 2025, PETS 2025, ICML 2025, USENIX Security 2025, CAST/GI Dissertation Award IT-Security 2025, NeurIPS 2025, IEEE SaTML 2025, SSR 2024, ICML 2024, TPMPC 2024, ICLR 2024, CAST/GI Dissertation Award IT-Security 2024, CAI 2023, ACM CCS 2023, NeurIPS 2023, USENIX Security 2023 (Noteworthy Reviewer Award), CSCML 2023, CAST/GI Dissertation Award IT-Security 2023, NeurIPS 2022, PrivateNLP @ NAACL 2022, ICML 2022, PPML @ CCS 2021, PrivateNLP @ NAACL 2021, PrivateNLP @ EMNLP 2020

Editor

• Designs, Codes and Cryptography (DESI)

Standardisation

• Member of BSI committee IST/33/2 (Cryptography and Security Mechanisms), contributing to ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27/WG 2 standards

PhD Students

• Sophie Hawkes (Supervisor)
• Jorele Simons (Co-Supervisor)
• Katy Lambert (Advisor)
• Tabitha Ogilvie (Advisor)
• Simon Pohmann (Advisor)

Honors and Awards

• Springer Nature Editor of Distinction Award 2026 (Editorial Contribution Award for Designs, Codes and Cryptography)
• Runner-up Distinguished Paper Award at IEEE SaTML'24
• Noteworthy Reviewer Award at USENIX Security 2023
• Award for the Best Dissertation at the CS Department of TU Darmstadt in 2021 by "Friends of TU Darmstadt e.V."
• Finalist CAST/GI Dissertation Award IT-Security 2022
• German IT-Security Award 2020 (2nd prize for "ContactGuard: Mobile Private Contact Discovery")
• Bug bounties from Facebook and PayPal for responsible disclosure of privacy vulnerabilities
• CROSSING Collaboration Award 2017
• Germany Scholarship (Deutschlandstipendium)

Work Experience

• Since 2026/08 Associate Professor
• 2022/04 - 2026/07 Lecturer in Informartion Security
• 2021/09 – 2022/02 Postdoctoral Researcher at ENCRYPTO
• 2016/09 – 2021/08 Doctoral Researcher at ENCRYPTO
• 2014/04 – 2016/07 Student Research Assistant at CDC
• 2015/10 – 2016/03 Student Teaching Assistant at GRIS

Education

• 2016-2021 Ph.D. in Computer Science (with distinction), TU Darmstadt, Germany
• 2013-2016 M.Sc. in Computer Science (with honors); Minor: Business Administration, Economics and Law, TU Darmstadt, Germany
• 2010-2013 B.Sc. in Computer Science, TU Darmstadt, Germany

Publications

CORE A/A* ranked venues marked in bold.

2026

• Felix Marx, Thomas Schneider, Ajith Suresh, Tobias Wehrle, Christian Weinert, Hossein Yalame: WW-FL: Secure and Private Large-Scale Federated Learning. In IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES'26). Antalya, Türkiye, Oct. 2026. CORE Ranking A.
• Sophie Hawkes, Christian Weinert: SoK: Outsourced Private Set Intersection. In 24. International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS'26). CORE ranking B.
• Lorenzo Bunaj, Christian Weinert: MPC Challenges: A New CTF-Based Teaching Supplement. In 12. Theory and Practice of Multi-Party Computation Workshop (TPMPC'26). Aarhus, Denmark, May 2026. Contributed Talk.

2025

• Gowri R Chandran, Thomas Schneider, Maximilian Stillger, Christian Weinert: Concretely Efficient Private Set Union via Circuit-based PSI. In 20. ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS'25). Ha Noi, Vietnam, Aug. 2025. CORE Ranking A.
• Hiroki Okada, Rachel Player, Simon Pohmann, Christian Weinert: On Algebraic Homomorphic Encryption and its Applications to Doubly-Efficient PIR. In EUROCRYPT 2025 - The 44. Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques. Madrid, Spain, May. 2025. Acceptance rate 20.1%. CORE Ranking A*.
• Hiroki Okada, Rachel Player, Simon Pohmann, Christian Weinert: On Algebraic Homomorphic Encryption and its Applications to Doubly-Efficient PIR. In 4. Annual FHE.org Conference on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE.org'25). Sofia, Bulgaria, Mar. 2025. Poster.

2024

• Sophie Hawkes, Christian Weinert, Teresa Almeida, Maryam Mehrnezhad: Perceptual Hash Inversion Attacks on Image-Based Sexual Abuse Removal Tools. In IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine. 2024. CORE ranking B.
• Christian Weinert: Unbalanced PSI: Applications, Constructions, and Combinations with PIR. In NIST Workshop on Privacy-Enhancing Cryptography (WPEC'24). Virtual Event, Sep. 2024. Contributed Talk.
• Yaniv Ben-Itzhak, Helen Möllering, Benny Pinkas, Thomas Schneider, Ajith Suresh, Oleksandr Tkachenko, Shay Vargaftik, Christian Weinert, Hossein Yalame, Avishay Yanai: ScionFL: Secure Quantized Aggregation for Federated Learning. In 2. IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML'24). Toronto, Canada, Apr. 2024. Runner-up Distinguished Paper Award.
• Hiroki Okada, Rachel Player, Simon Pohmann, Christian Weinert: Towards Practical Doubly-Efficient Private Information Retrieval. In 28. International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC'24). Willemstad, Curaçao, Mar. 2024. CORE Ranking A.

2023

• Zoltán Ádám Mann, Christian Weinert, Daphnee Chabal, Joppe W. Bos: Towards Practical Secure Neural Network Inference: The Journey So Far and the Road Ahead. In ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR'23), pp. 1-37. CORE ranking A*.
• Laura Hetz, Thomas Schneider, Christian Weinert: Scaling Mobile Private Contact Discovery to Billions of Users. In 28. European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS'23). The Hague, The Netherlands, 2023. CORE ranking A.

2022

• Christoph Hagen, Christian Weinert, Christoph Sendner, Alexandra Dmitrienko, Thomas Schneider: Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers: Low-cost Attacks, Quantitative Analyses, and Efficient Mitigations. In ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS'22), pp. 1–44. CORE ranking A.

2021

• Alexander Heinrich, Matthias Hollick, Thomas Schneider, Milan Stute, Christian Weinert: Breaking and Fixing Contact Identifier-based Mutual Authentication in Apple AirDrop. In 1. Future of PI: Challenges and Perspectives of Personal Identification EuroS&P Workshop (FoPI@EuroS&P’21). Virtual Event, Sep. 2021. Contributed Talk.
• Christian Weinert: Practical Private Set Intersection Protocols for Privacy-Preserving Applications. PhD thesis, TU Darmstadt, Germany, August 31, 2021.
• Alexander Heinrich, Matthias Hollick, Thomas Schneider, Milan Stute, Christian Weinert: PrivateDrop: Practical Privacy-Preserving Authentication for Apple AirDrop. In 30. USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security’21). Vancouver, Canada, Aug. 2021, pp. 3577–3594. Acceptance rate 19.0%. CORE ranking A*.
• Daniel Demmler, Stefan Katzenbeisser, Thomas Schneider, Tom Schuster, Christian Weinert: Improved Circuit Compilation for Hybrid MPC via Compiler Intermediate Representation. In 18. International Conference on Security and Cryptography (SECRYPT’21). Virtual Event, Jul. 2021, pp. 444–451. Short paper. Acceptance rate 28.2%. CORE ranking B.
• Alexander Heinrich, Matthias Hollick, Thomas Schneider, Milan Stute, Christian Weinert: AirCollect: Efficiently Recovering Hashed Phone Numbers Leaked via Apple AirDrop. In 14. ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec’21). Abu Dhabi, UAE, Jun. 2021, pp. 371–373. Demo. Acceptance rate (poster and demonstrator track) 78.6%.
• Tim Heldmann, Thomas Schneider, Oleksandr Tkachenko, Christian Weinert, Hossein Yalame: LLVM-based Circuit Compilation for Practical Secure Computation. In 19. International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS’21). Kamakura, Japan, Jun. 2021, pp. 99–121. Acceptance rate 19.9%. CORE ranking B.
• Christoph Hagen, Christian Weinert, Christoph Sendner, Alexandra Dmitrienko, Thomas Schneider: All the Numbers are US: Large-scale Abuse of Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers. In 28. Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS’21). San Diego, CA, USA, Feb. 2021. Acceptance rate 15.2%. CORE ranking A*.

2020

• Heiko Mantel, Lukas Scheidel, Thomas Schneider, Alexandra Weber, Christian Weinert: RiCaSi: Rigorous Cache Side Channel Mitigation via Selective Circuit Compilation. In 19. International Conference on Cryptology And Network Security (CANS’20). Vienna, Austria, Dec. 2020, pp. 505–525. Acceptance rate 25.4%. CORE ranking B.
• Amos Treiber, Alejandro Molina, Christian Weinert, Thomas Schneider, Kristian Kersting: CryptoSPN: Expanding PPML beyond Neural Networks. In 1. Privacy Preserving Machine Learning in Practice CCS Workshop (PPMLP@CCS’20). Orlando, Florida, USA, Nov. 2020, pp. 9–14.
• Amos Treiber, Alejandro Molina, Christian Weinert, Thomas Schneider, Kristian Kersting: CryptoSPN: Privacy-preserving Sum-Product Network Inference. In 24. European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI’20). Santiago de Compostela, Spain, Aug. 2020, pp. 1946–1953. Acceptance rate 26.8%. CORE ranking A.
• Rosario Cammarota, Matthias Schunter, Anand Rajan, Fabian Boemer, Ágnes Kiss, Amos Treiber, Christian Weinert, Thomas Schneider, Emmanuel Stapf, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Daniel Demmler, Huili Chen, Siam Umar Hussain, Sadegh Riazi, Farinaz Koushanfar, Saransh Gupta, Tajan Simunic Rosing, Kamalika Chaudhuri, Hamid Nejatollahi, Nikil Dutt, Mohsen Imani, Kim Laine, Anuj Dubey, Aydin Aysu, Fateme Sadat Hosseini, Chengmo Yang, Eric Wallace, Pamela Norton: Trustworthy AI Inference Systems: An Industry Research View. arXiv:2008.04449.
• Sebastian P. Bayerl, Tommaso Frassetto, Patrick Jauernig, Korbinian Riedhammer, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Thomas Schneider, Emmanuel Stapf, Christian Weinert: Offline Model Guard: Secure and Private ML on Mobile Devices. In 23. Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference (DATE’20). Grenoble, France, Mar. 2020, pp. 460–465. Acceptance rate 26%. CORE ranking B.

2019

• Sebastian P. Bayerl, Ferdinand Brasser, Christoph Busch, Tommaso Frassetto, Patrick Jauernig, Jascha Kolberg, Andreas Nautsch, Korbinian Riedhammer, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Thomas Schneider, Emmanuel Stapf, Amos Treiber, Christian Weinert: Privacy-Preserving Speech Processing via STPC and TEEs. In 2. Privacy Preserving Machine Learning CCS Workshop (PPML@CCS’19). London, UK, Nov. 2019. Poster. Acceptance rate 55%.
• Susanne Felsen, Ágnes Kiss, Thomas Schneider, Christian Weinert: Secure and Private Function Evaluation with Intel SGX. In 10. ACM Cloud Computing Security Workshop (CCSW’19). London, UK, Nov. 2019, pp. 165–181. Acceptance rate 37.5%.
• Daniel Kales, Christian Rechberger, Thomas Schneider, Matthias Senker, Christian Weinert: Mobile Private Contact Discovery at Scale. In 28. USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security’19). Santa Clara, CA, USA, Aug. 2019, pp. 1447–1464. Acceptance rate 16.2%. CORE ranking A*.

2018

• Ferdinand Brasser, Tommaso Frassetto, Korbinian Riedhammer, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Thomas Schneider, Christian Weinert: VoiceGuard: Secure and Private Speech Processing. In 19. Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH’18). Hyderabad, India, Sep. 2018, pp. 1303–1307. Acceptance rate 54.0%. CORE ranking A.
• Oleksandr Tkachenko, Christian Weinert, Thomas Schneider, Kay Hamacher: Large-Scale Privacy-Preserving Statistical Computations for Distributed Genome-Wide Association Studies. In 13. ACM Asia Conference on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS’18). Incheon, Korea, Jun. 2018, pp. 221–235. Acceptance rate 16.8%. CORE ranking A.
• M. Sadegh Riazi, Christian Weinert, Oleksandr Tkachenko, Ebrahim M. Songhori, Thomas Schneider, Farinaz Koushanfar: Chameleon: A Hybrid Secure Computation Framework for Machine Learning Applications. In 13. ACM Asia Conference on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS’18). Incheon, Korea, Jun. 2018, pp. 707–721. Acceptance rate 16.8%. CORE ranking A.
• Benny Pinkas, Thomas Schneider, Christian Weinert, Udi Wieder: Efficient Circuit-based PSI via Cuckoo Hashing. In EUROCRYPT 2018 – The 37. Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques. Tel Aviv, Israel, Apr. 2018, pp. 125–157. Acceptance rate 23.0%. CORE ranking A*.

2017

• Stefan Krüger, Sarah Nadi, Michael Reif, Karim Ali, Mira Mezini, Eric Bodden, Florian Göpfert, Felix Günther, Christian Weinert, Daniel Demmler, Ram Kamath: CogniCrypt: Supporting Developers in using Cryptography. In 32. IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE’17). Urbana- Champaign, IL, USA, Nov. 2017, pp. 931–936. Acceptance rate (tool demonstration track) 62.5%. CORE ranking A*.
• Christian Weinert, Denise Demirel, Martín Vigil, Matthias Geihs, Johannes Buchmann: MoPS: A Modular Protection Scheme for Long-Term Storage. In 12. ACM Asia Conference on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS’17). Abu Dhabi, UAE, Apr. 2017, pp. 436–448. Acceptance rate 19.8%. CORE ranking A.

2016

• Christian Weinert. Building a Modular Long-term Archiving System. Master's thesis, TU Darmstadt, Germany, July 25, 2016.

2015

• Martín Vigil, Johannes Buchmann, Daniel Cabarcas, Christian Weinert, Alexander Wiesmaier: Integrity, Authenticity, Non-Repudiation, and Proof of Existence for Long-Term Archiving: A Survey. In Computers & Security 50 (CoSe'15), pp. 16–32. CORE ranking B.

2014

• Martín Vigil, Christian Weinert, Denise Demirel, Johannes Buchmann: An Efficient Time-Stamping Solution for Long-Term Digital Archiving. In 33. IEEE International Performance Computing and Communications Conference (IPCCC’14). Austin, TX, USA, Dec. 2014, pp. 1–8. Acceptance rate 31.7%. CORE ranking B.
• Martín Vigil, Christian Weinert, Kjell Braden, Denise Demirel, Johannes Buchmann: A Performance Analysis of Long-Term Archiving Techniques. In 16. IEEE International Conference on High Performace Computing and Communications (HPCC’14). Paris, France, Aug. 2014, pp. 878–889. Acceptance rate 25.0%. CORE ranking B.

2013

• Christian Weinert. Content Integrity System and Notarisation for Long-term Protection of Data Objects. Bachelor's thesis, TU Darmstadt, Germany, October 18, 2013.