Pratyush DIKSHIT

Pratyush Dikshit is a part of the Digital Financial Services and Cross-Organisational Digital Transformations (FINATRAX) research group, headed by Prof. Gilbert Fridgen.

Pratyush’s academic pursuits revolve around the user’s privacy under the umbrella of cybersecurity. His research interests lie in the areas of verifiable credentials, privacy-preserving technologies, cryptographic algorithms such as digital signature (ECDSA, Schnorr), zero-knowledge proof systems, and multiparty computation. His current research endeavours to study various trust services, such as qualified website authentication certificate (QWAC) and European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDIW) introduced under European electronic IDentification, Authentication and Trust Services (eIDAS) regulation.

During his master’s, Pratyush was involved in course content creation, examination paper setup, invigilation during exams, and marking of answer sheets for bachelor students.

Pratyush has actively participated in outreach activities. He presented his research at the Privacy-Preserving Cryptography Summer School (2024) at CISPA, Germany, discussing privacy concerns in the EUDIW. He partificpated in the ICANN DNSSEC Security Workshop (2023), where he presented an analysis of the DNS Flag Day 2020 recommendations. He actively attended and contributed to key events, like the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (2022) in Nice, France, and the IETF 115 Privacy Group (PEARG) Meeting (2022) in London, fostering international collaboration in privacy-preserving technologies.

He has received a number of awards in both academica and industry, including Best Paper award at the IFIP Networking Conference Barcelona in 2023, and Best Paper Presentation award at National Workshop on Cryptology in 2016. He also received fellowships in India, including GATE fellowship from 2015-2017, and Prime Minister scholarship from 2010-2014. In industry, he received the Outstanding Leadership Award from Cisco’s CEO for his Cisco Care initiative in 2021, and the Innovative Mind award in 2019.

He worked in Cisco Systems as Network Security Consulting Engineer from July 2017-August 2022. Later, he worked as a research assistant at CISPA-Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Germany from September 2022-March 2024.

Pratyush completed his Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science at Uttar Pradesh Technical University, India in 2014. He received his Master of Science (by research) degree in Computer Science, with a specialisation in cryptography at the National Institute of Technology, Trichy, India in 2017.