My current students

• Viet Tung Hoang is has been working with me on symmetric encryption techniques and their analysis. Our first completed project deals with the analysis of Feistel networks by coupling.

My former students

• John Black is an ace rock climber, a crack teacher, and an excellent computer scientist. He won one of four Chancellor’s teaching fellowships at UCD, and twice won our outstanding TA awards. He got his Ph.D. in 2000. He won an NSF CAREER Award. John is now a tenured professor at the University of Colorado, at Boulder.
• Ted Krovetz is great swimmer, teacher, and computer scientist (I think he swims faster than I run). Ted is a superb experimentalist as well as an excellent theorist. Ted got his Ph.D. in 2000. He is now a tenured professor at Sacramento State. We continue to work together.
• Tom Ristenpart says he was never formally my student, but he certainly felt like my student to me! Tom completed his master’s degree at UCD in 2005 and is now finishing up UCSD. Tom set an apparent world record by learning to ride a motorbike (a near-necessary conveyance while visiting me in Thailand) in 12.5 seconds.
• Tom Shrimpton is a professor at Portland State University. He just got back from a two-year stint at the University of Lugano. Tom looks like a movie star and thinks like a professor. With a background in signal processing and information theory, Tom married a woman named Shannon. Tom graduated in 2004 and was recently awarded an NSF CAREER Award. We are continuing to work together.
• Till Stegers came to me with a math background in Germany and then Tulane. Till worked on formal vs. computational cryptography, partially specified protocols, and format-preserving encryption. Till got his Ph.D. in 2010 and has now taken a nice position at Google, in Santa Monica, California.
• John Steinberger got his Ph.D. in mathematics in July 2007 and is now at the Tsinghua University, China. Much of John’s work is in combinatorics, but John has done some amazing things in cryptography too, such as proving the security of the hash-function MDC-2.

Other advising

• I am both an undergraduate advisor (and currently chair of the committee of undergraduate CS advisors) and a graduate advisor (and chairing that committee, too). If you have an advising question, feel free to drop by my office hours to talk. I'd like to encourage undergraduates (most definitely including our “top” students) to come and have “real” exchange — advising isn't just a formality for getting you “advising hold” lifted. Advisor-less graduate students likewise also need to be seen regularly for “real” advising.