Sherman S. M. Chow

B.Eng., M.Phil. (HKU), M.S., Ph.D. (NYU)
EAI Fellow 2019
100 Most Influential Scholars (Security and Privacy, 2018)
[ Official | Scholar | Google | ORCID ]
Email: [username]@ie.cuhk.edu.hk
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Sherman is an Associate Professor of the Department of Information Engineering (IE) at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), which he joined in November 2012. He received the Early Career Award 2013/14 by the Hong Kong Research Grant Council (RGC). He is also a program co-director of MSc in Information Science and Technology Management (Full-time), co-offered by Department of Decisions, Operations and Technology, CUHK Business School.

He was a research fellow at Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo, a position he commenced after receiving his Ph.D. degree from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University.
He interned at NTT Research and Development (Tokyo), Microsoft Research (Redmond) and Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory, and has made research visits to Friedrich-Alexander-U., Academia Sinica, U. Maryland, U. Calgary, U. Texas, MIT, and Queensland University of Technology.

He works on Cryptography, Cyber Security, Privacy, Theoretical Computer Science and Communications, and has published in major conferences such as AsiaCrypt, CCS, EuroCrypt, ITCS, NDSS, S&P, and Usenix Security.

He has served as a program co-chair of CESS '24, BlockSEA '18, CANS '17, Security in Cloud Computing '15, ISC '14, and ProvSec '14, and as a senior program committee member of PETS '22-'23. He also serves on the program committees of 270+ international conferences/workshops (full list in '10-'24) on cryptography, security, privacy, network, cloud, fintech, access control, AI, IoT, PKI, and forensics, including

Crypto 2019, AsiaCrypt 2012-2017, 2023, CT-RSA 2020, PKC 2015
EuroS&P 2024, NDSS 2024, Usenix Sec. 2021-24, CCS 2014, 22-23, RAID 2023
Web 2019, 21-23, PETS 2018, 21-23 (Quality/Top Senior PC in '23/'22)
Infocom 2015-2019 (Distinguished TPC in 2018), ICDCS 2015-16, 20-23
IJCAI 2022-'23 (Distinguished PC Member in '22), Financial Crypt. 2013-15

He is invited to help

European Research Council as a Remote Referee (2020)
on the committee of The Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET Award) 2019
LSCM as an Expert Review Panel member (Jan '15 to Dec '20)
reviewing for Technology and Business Development Fund (TBF) application at CUHK (2020)

He serves/served on the editorial boards of

IEEE Trans. Information Forensics and Security (TIFS)
(Senior Area Editor, Jul '24-, AE: 2015 - 2019)
ACM Transactions on Security and Privacy (TOPS, Apr '24-)
ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice (DLT, Oct '21-)
IEEE Trans. Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC, May '21-)
Intl. J. Information Security (IJIS, since May 2013)
SpringerBriefs in Information Security and Cryptography
(formerly Cyber Security Systems and Networks, founding board, Apr '17 -)
EAI Endorsed Transactions on Scalable Information Systems
(Area Editor: Information Security, since May 2018)
IET Information Security (IET-IFS)
(Deputy Editor (Cryptography), Jan '21 - Apr '23)
(Editorial Board Member, 2018 - 2020)
J. of Information Security and Applications (JISA, Jun '13 - Oct '21)

also as a lead guest-editor of

He is co-chairing the SIG on Fundamentals under IEEE TEMS Technical Committee on Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies (since May '21),
a founding member of IEEE SMC's Blockchain technical committee (since '18),
and a research committee of Hong Kong Blockchain Society (since Sep '19).

Funded Projects (RGC, as PI):

Decentralizing Cryptosystems, HKD 838K
Deep Learning with Privacy, HKD 731K
Password-Hardening Services, HKD 875K
Sublinear Multi-Writer Searchable Encryption, HKD 700K
Searchable Encryption: General Framework and Practical Constructions, HKD 693K
Accountable Privacy in Online Communications, HKD 916K

Non-funded Projects:

New Proofs for Commitment, Signatures, and More
(resulted in a Usenix Security 2024 paper, and other papers in the pipeline)
Privacy-Preserving Text Analytics: Differential Privacy for Sentence Embeddings and Language Models
(resulted in a CCS 2023 paper, and its preliminary work as a Web 2023 paper)
Access Control Encryption: General Framework and Practical Constructions
(resulted in an S&P 2021 paper and an ACNS 2021 paper
(and later an ISIT 2023 paper))
Functional Credentials: Theory and Practice
(resulted in an AsiaCrypt 2018 paper and an ACSAC 2021 paper)

Openings:

Postdoc or PhD students with strong interest(s) in my research areas
(Apply for our funded Summer Workshop for HK PhD Fellowship.
3 participants got PhD offer in our group.)
I enjoy working with motivated students. My students published in AsiaCrypt, CT-RSA, FC, ITCS, NDSS, PETS, S&P, Usenix Security, etc.
Impress me with your papers in reputable venues and your own research statement.
If you are a CUHK (undergrad / master / PhD) student
and would like to explore cyber security with me, send me an email.

Current PhD Students:

Jack P. K. Ma, defended on Aug 3, 2023, BSc(CUHK)
(working on Anonymous Credentials, Secure Multi-party Computation)
Harry W. H. Wong, defended on Aug 24, BSc(CUHK)
(working on Lattice-Based Cryptography, Threshold Cryptography)
Minxin Du, defended on Sep 5, MS(WHU), BS-HongYi(WHU)
(working on Differential Privacy, internd at Huawei)
Huangting Wu, BSc(CUHK)
(working on Pairing-Based Cryptography)
Andes Y. L. Kei, BEng(CUHK), HK PhD Fellowship (HKPFS) Awardee
(working on AI and Blockchain)
Ying-yu Pan, MSc, BEng(BUPT)

Visiting Student:

Weihan Li (Aug '23 - ), PhD student at Beihang U.

Past Post-Doctoral Research Fellows:

Jiafan Wang, PhD(CUHK)
(Jan '23 - Feb '23)
Yongjun Zhao, PhD, BEng(CUHK)
(Sep '18 - Sep '19, results: AAAI '21, ACSAC '21, NDSS '21, PKC '19)
Yu Chen
(Aug '15 - Jan '16, results: PKC '16, JoC '22)

Alumni:

Tao Zhang, PhD, BEng(CUHK), interned at I2R; currently with Tencent
"Contribution to Structure-Preserving Cryptography and Accountable Privacy"
(CT-RSA, ESORICS, FC)
Yongjun Zhao, PhD, BEng(CUHK), visited U. Surrey, now with ByteDance
"Privacy Enhancing Technologies: New Primitives and New Systems"
(AsiaCCS->TDSC, FC, PETS, WPES)
Russell W. F. Lai, RA (Aug '16 - Jul '17), MPhil, BEng+BSc(CUHK)
"Secure Delegation of Parallel Computation"
(ACNS, ITCS)
Raymond K. H. Tai, MPhil, BSc(CUHK)
"Privacy-Preserving Decision Trees Evaluation Protocols"
(ESORICS, NDSS)
Xiuhua Wang, PhD(CUHK); now with HUST
"Secure and More Practical Access Control Encryption"
(ACNS, S&P)
Lucien K. L. Ng, MPhil, BSc-Elite(CUHK); now studying at Georgia Tech.
"Crypto-/Hardware-Assisted Privacy-Preserving Deep Neural Network Frameworks"
(AAAI, Usenix Security)
Jiafan Wang, PhD(CUHK), BSc(CSU); now with CSIRO's Data61, Australia.
"New Notions of Multi-Client Searchable Encryption"
(Usenix Security, NDSS)

Mid-Term Visitors:

Mahdi Sedaghat (KU Leuven, ESAT/COSIC, Belgium) [talk]
Russell W. F. Lai (PhD student at FAU, now with Aalto) [talks: 1, 2]
Giulio Malavolta (was a PhD student at FAU, now with MPI-SP) [talk]
Viktoria Ronge (PhD student at FAU)
Yvo G. Desmedt (University of Texas at Dallas) [talks: 1, 2]
Rong Hu (was a PhD student at Kyushu University)
Kai-Min Chung (Academia Sinica, TW) [talk]
Cong Zhang (previously RA at HKU, now with ZJU)

Short-Term Visitors:

Qiang Tang (U. of Sydney) [talk]
Jintai Ding (Tsinghua University and BIMSA, China) [talk]
Stella Wohnig (CISPA, Germany)
Yingfei Yan (Xidian University, China)
Dimitris Kolonelos (IMDEA Software Institute & Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain) [talk]
David Balbás, (IMDEA Software Institute & Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain) [talk]
Jonathan Katz (University of Maryland College Park) [talk]
Florian Kerschbaum (University of Waterloo) [talk]
Qiang Tang (New Jersey Institute of Technology) [talk]
Ioannis Demertzis (now UC. Santa Cruz)
Tsz Hon Yuen (now Monash) [talk]
Peizhao Hu (Rochester Institute of Technology) [talk]
Ming Li (University of Arizona) [talk]
Joseph Bonneau (now NYU/University of Melbourne) [talk]
Dominique Schroeder (now Technical University Wien in Vienna) [talk]
Linfeng Zhou (now with Coinbase)
Anthony T.S. Ho (University of Surrey, UK) [talk]
Zhen Liu (was with ASTRI, now SJTU)
Yong Guan (Iowa State University, US) [talk]
Liqun Chen (HP Labs, now U. Surrey, UK) [talk]
Brian A. LaMacchia (Microsoft Research Redmond) [talk]

Past Part-Time RA:

Anna Woo (MIE-Elite, now with U. Mich)
Erwin Chan (MIE)

Past UG Research Intern:

Shuyang Tang (Shanghai Jiaotong University)
(Oct '17 - Feb '18, result: ICDCS '23, ACISP '19 Best Student Paper Award)

Past Summer Research Interns:

Andes Y. L. Kei (FinTech-Elite)
Anna P. Y. Woo (MIE-Elite, Best Project Award winner)
Feng Zhao (CS)
Yixiang Zhou
Kelvin K. C. Chan (MIE)
Jack P. K. Ma (MIE)
Wenjie Zhao (MIE)
Jianhan Song (IE, Current PhD student at UT Austin)
Angela Xuan (MIE)
Russell W. F. Lai (MATH+IERG, Best Project Award winner)
Luke Wang (IBBA+IERG)

Past FYP Supervisions: (Selected projects)

Exploitation and Hacking in Android Games: Jingdong Huang, Yu-Wai Wong (Final Year Project Award!)
Improving Latency of Secure Neural Network Inference: Nash Chow, Peter Wong
Deep Neural Network in Secure Linux Container with Trusted Processor: Gary Chow, Donald Wong (Final Year Project Award!)
Secure Machine Learning: Lucien K. L. Ng (Bronze Award of the ASM Technology Award 2018!)
TLS 0-RTT Key Exchange: Erwin Chan, Lynus Wong
Permissions-Oriented Android Apps Store: King Ng, Edwin Sin
Privacy Preserving Machine Learning Classification: Jack Ma, Raymond Tai (published in ESORICS 2017!)

MSc Alumni (with research project supervision):

2021-22: Liping Xia
2021: Zheng Yang
2019-20: Xiang Li (next: University of Tokyo)
2018-19: Qian Chen, Luohong Yang, Yixin Yue
2015: Zhenjie Song, Yisong Wu, Rachel Zhu
2014: Hua Tong, Muren Zhang
2013-14: Teresa Dermawan (co-supervised with C. C. Loy), Weiyi Mao
2013-14: Huirui Han
2013: Bo Chen
2013: Yingkai Tang
2012: Rongbin Li

Upcoming/Recent Papers

[RAID 2023] How (Not) to Build Threshold EdDSA
[ISIT 2023] Unconditionally Secure Access Control Encryption
[S&P 2023] SoK: Cryptographic Neural-Network Computation
[EuroS&P 2023] SMART Credentials in the Multi-queue of Slackness (or Secure Management of Anonymous Reputation Traits without Global Halting)
[TheWeb 2023] Sanitizing Sentence Embeddings (and Labels) for Local Differential Privacy
[NDSS 2023] Real Threshold ECDSA
[Usenix Security 2022] Omnes pro uno: Practical Multi-Writer Encrypted Database
[ACNS 2022] Don't Tamper with Dual System Encryption
[AsiaCCS 2022] Secure-Computation-Friendly Private Set Intersection from Oblivious Compact Graph Evaluation
[ACSAC 2021] Sipster: Settling IOU Privately and Quickly with Smart Meters
[DBSec 2021] Simple Storage-Saving Structure for Volume-Hiding Encrypted Multi-Maps (Best Student Paper Award)

Videos:

Freeware:

Simple Password-Hardened Encryption Services (Usenix Sec. '18, free toolkit)

Recent Invited Talks:

4^th Intl' Workshop on Application Intelligence and Blockchain Security (AIBlock), co-located with ACNS
(Jun '22, Rome (Virtual), Italy)
CUHK x ASTRI Industry Talk Series (Vol. 2)
(Apr '21, Shatin, Hong Kong)
4^th CUHK Conference on Financial Technology
(Nov '20, Shatin, Hong Kong)
13^th Intl' Conference on Network and System Security
(Dec '19, Sapporo, Japan)
Summer Summit on Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technologies 2019
(Aug '19, Kowloon, Hong Kong)
7^th Intl' Workshop on Security in Cloud Computing (SCC)
(Jul '19, Auckland, New Zealand, also a panelist)
22^nd Workshop on Elliptic Curve Cryptography
(Nov '18, Osaka, Japan)
1^st Intl' Conference on Frontiers in Cyber Security
(Nov '18, Chengdu, China)
14^th Intl' Conference on Information Security Practice and Experience
(Sep '18, Tokyo, Japan)
12^th Intl' Conference on Network and System Security
(Aug '18, Hong Kong, short talk + panelist)
IEEE Intl' Workshop on Blockchain for the Internet of Things,
(July '18, Halifax, Canada)
9^th IEEE Intl' Conf. on Cloud Computing Technology and Science
(Dec '17, Hong Kong, also a panelist)
Cryptography and Security Frontier Forum
(Aug '17, State Key Laboratory of Cryptology, Beijing, China)
3^rd Cyber Security Workshop
(June '17, Wuhan, China)
3^rd Intl. Symposium on Mobile Security
(Dec '16, Seoul, South Korea)
2^nd IoT Privacy, Trust, and Security
(May '16, Xi'an, China)
Next-generation Cryptography
(Sep '15, IMI, Kyushu University; and ISIT, Japan)
"Information Security Leading Edge Forum"
(July '15, Guangzhou University, China)
Intl. Cryptology and Information Security Conference
(June '14, Putrajaya, Malaysia)

Upcoming Conferences to "Attend":

('24 :) Usenix Security 2024, ...

Recent Conferences Attended:

('23, physically :) ACNS, ICDCS, RAID, CCS
('23, remotely...:) NDSS, S&P (just SMC session :), EuroS&P (just online Q&A), ...
('22, still virtually... :) The Web, AsiaCCS, ACNS (AIBlock), PETS, Usenix Security
('21, still virtually :) IJCAI '20, AAAI, NDSS, The Web, S&P, AsiaCCS, ACNS, ICDCS, PETS, DBSec, Usenix Sec., PPML@Crypto, ESORICS, ACSAC, AsiaCrypt, IndoCrypt
('20, virtually :) DASFAA, ACNS, AsiaCCS, AsiaCrypt, CANS
('19 :) PKC, AsiaCCS (SCC), NSS
('18 :) Infocom, AsiaCCS, ESSA 2, IEEE Blockchain, NSS, ISPEC, CCS (WPES), FCS, BlockSEA (@ICDM), ECC, AsiaCrypt
('17 :) FC, Cyber Security, ACNS, Usenix Security, CANS, AsiaCrypt, CloudCom
('16 :) PKC, AsiaCCS (IoTPTS), SACMAT, ICDCS, TrustCom, IWSEC, SecureComm, ProvSec, Mobile Security (MSEC)
('15 :) FC, AsiaCCS (SCC), Infocom, ProvSec, AsiaCrypt
('14 :) CT-RSA, Infocom, AsiaCCS, Malaysia Cryptology, ProvSec, ISC, IEEE-CNS, ACM CCS, AsiaCrypt, Inscrypt
('13 :) FC, AsiaCCS
('12 :) EuroCrypt, ACNS, AsiaCrypt

School-Programs Attended:

Teaching:

IERG 4150 Introduction to Cryptography (Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021)

IERG 4360 Blockchain and Applications (Fall 2023, co-teaching with Jack Ma)

ENGG 5383 Applied Cryptography (Spring 2023, Fall 2020, Fall 2018, Fall 2017, Fall 2015, Spring 2014, Spring 2013)

IEMS 5725 Blockchain and Applications (Spring 2023)

DSME 6788 Cyber Security (1st Trimester, 2022-23; 2nd Trimester, 2021-22; 3rd Trimester, 2020-21, 2019-20; 2nd Trimester, 2018-19)

SBMS 3208 Forensic Science (Guest Lecture on IT Forensics, Fall 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019)

CSCI/IERG 5590/IEMS 5709 Advanced topics in Blockchain (Spring 2022, Spring 2020, Spring 2019)

IERG 4210 Web Programming and Security (Spring 2021)

IERG 5310 Security & Privacy in Cyber Systems (Fall 2019, Spring 2015)

IERG 4220 Secure Software Engineering (Springer 2018, Spring 2017)

IERG 4130 or ESTR 4306 Intro. to Cyber Security (Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Fall 2014, Fall 2013)

Some Other Duties:

Curriculum Committee
Graduate Panel
Faculty representative member of Task Force on Cyber Security
IT Resources Planning & Facilities Management Committee, Shaw College
Department Coordinator, Shaw College (20-22)
Member of U/G Summer Research Internship Committee (15-16)
Director of Work Study Programme (Past)

Topics in Cryptography:

Conferences/Journals in Cryptography:

Links: