Ioannis Demertzis

Assistant Professor

Computer Science and Engineering Dept.

Baskin School of Engineering

University of California, Santa Cruz

About Me

I am an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science and Engineering Dept. of UC Santa Cruz. My research focuses on applied cryptography, security & privacy, and secure databases/systems. My goal is to bridge the gap between cryptography/security and real-world systems/databases by working in both areas; aiming to build cryptographic solutions and real systems that are simultaneously practical, efficient, and provably secure.

Before joining UCSC, I was a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the EECS Dept. of UC Berkeley working with Prof. Raluca Ada Popa. I received my Ph.D. from the ECE Dept. of the University of Maryland, advised by Prof. Charalampos Papamanthou. I obtained my ECE Diploma and M.Sc at the Technical University of Crete, under the supervision of Minos Garofalakis.

I am the recipient of the ACM SIGSAC Doctoral Dissertation Award Runner-up, Distinguished Dissertation Award (University of Maryland), and the Symantec Research Labs Graduate Fellowship. I have also been at the Crypto Group of Visa Research, the Research Labs of Symantec, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the Microsoft Research Labs as a PhD intern.


If you are interested you are encouraged to inform me directly about your intent to apply. Send your CV, a short description of your research experience and interests, and a link to your personal website (if any). Click here for more information.

Latest News

Feb 2024
Accepted at USENIX 2024, our work with my student Priyanka Mondal and collaborators from HKUST successfully integrates forward and backward privacy with I/O efficiency for DSE, disproving previous beliefs by CCS '16 and CRYPTO '24.
Dec 2023
I will serve on the Program Committee for SIGMOD 2025.
Nov 2023
Our paper "Distributed & Scalable Oblivious Sorting and Shuffling" has been accepted at IEEE SP'24.
First oblivious work that scales for hundreds of GB inputs.
Sep 2023
Nihal Talur joins my group at UCSC for Ph.D.
July 2023
Our paper "GraphOS: Towards Oblivious Graph Processing" has been accepted at VLDB 2023 and will be presented at VLDB 2024.
GraphOS is more secure and more efficient than prior state-of-the-art work. It also provides a new, more efficient Oblix.
June 2023
I will serve on the Program Committee for ICDE 2024 and AsiaCCS 2024.
Jan 2023
Exciting news! We are launching a security seminar at SRL. If you are interested in giving a talk, please contact me.
Dec 2022
I will serve on the Program Committee for SIGMOD 2024.
Sept 2022
We are excited to announce the launch of our Security Research Lab (SRL) at UCSC!
Check out our website for more information (http://srl-ucsc.github.io).
Aug 2022
Your contacts are safe! The Signal Messaging App uses our Snoopy and Oblix for oblivious contact discovery. Check out this post.
Jun 2022
Our work with my student Amin Karbas on "Dynamic Searchable Encryption with Optimal Search in the Presence of Deletions" has been accepted at USENIX 2022. Joint work with my collaborators from HKUST.
Jun 2022
Congratulations to my student Surya Keswani for completing his MSc thesis on oblivious computation.
May 2022
I will serve on the Program Committee of FCS'22 (Workshop on Foundations of Computer Security 2022).
Apr 2022
Two new Ph.D. students: Apostolos Mavrogiannakis and Muhammad Hamza Shahzad will join my group at UCSC in September 2022.
Mar 2022
Priyanka Mondal joins my group at UCSC (co-advised with Owen Arden).
Dec 2021
I will serve on the Program Committee for SIGMOD 2023.
Nov 2021
Very happy to receive the SIGSAC Doctoral Dissertation Award Runners-Up and Distinguished Dissertation Award (University of Maryland) for my Ph.D. Thesis on "Improving Efficiency, Expressiveness, and Security of Searchable Encryption".
Oct 2021
Our paper "Snoopy: Surpassing the Scalability Bottleneck of Oblivious Storage" has been accepted at SOSP 2021. Joint work with collaborators from UC Berkeley.
Sep 2021
Amin Karbas joins my group at UCSC for Ph.D.

Publications

Distributed & Scalable Oblivious Sorting and Shuffling

N. Ngai, I. Demertzis, JG Chamani, D.Papadopoulos
Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP) 2024, May 2024.

I/O-Efficient Dynamic Searchable Encryption meets Forward & Backward Privacy

P. Mondal, JG Chamani, I. Demertzis, D.Papadopoulos
Proceedings of USENIX 2024, August 2024.

GraphOS: Towards Oblivious Graph Processing

JG Chamani, I. Demertzis, D.Papadopoulos, Charalampos Papamanthou, Rasool Jalili
Proceedings of PVLDB 2023, August 2024.
[** Will be presented at VLDB'24 **]

Dynamic Searchable Encryption with Optimal Search in the Presence of Deletions

JG Chamani, D.Papadopoulos, M. Karbasforushan, I. Demertzis
Proceedings of USENIX 2022, August 2022.

Snoopy: Surpassing the Scalability Bottleneck of Oblivious Storage

E.Dauterman, V.Fang, I. Demertzis, N.Crooks, R.Popa
Proceedings of SOSP 2021, October 2021.

SEAL: Attack Mitigation for Encrypted Databases via Adjustable Leakage

I. Demertzis, D.Papadopoulos, C.Papamanthou, S.Shintre
Proceedings of USENIX 2020 Security Symposium, Boston MA, August 2020.

Dynamic Searchable Encryption with Small Client Storage

I. Demertzis, JG Chamani, D.Papadopoulos, C.Papamanthou
Proceedings of NDSS 2020, San Diego CA, February 2020.

Searchable Encryption with Optimal Locality: Achieving Sublogarithmic Read Efficiency

I. Demertzis, D.Papadopoulos, C.Papamanthou
Proceedings of CRYPTO 2018, Santa Barbara CA, August 2018.

Efficient Searchable Encryption Through Compression

I. Demertzis, R. Talapatra, C. Papamanthou
Proceedings of PVLDB 2018, Rio De Janeiro, August 2018.

Practical Private Range Search In Depth

I. Demertzis, S. Papadopoulos, O.Papapetrou, A. Deligiannakis, M. Garofalakis, C. Papamanthou
Proceedings of ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), Vol. 43, No. 1, March 2018.
[** Special Issue on the Best Papers of SIGMOD 2016 **]

Fast Searchable Encryption with Tunable Locality

I. Demertzis, C.Papamanthou
Proceedings of ACM SIGMOD 2017, Chicago IL, May 2017.

Practical Private Range Search Revisited

I. Demertzis, S. Papadopoulos, O. Papapetrou , A. Deligiannakis, M. Garofalakis
Proceedings of ACM SIGMOD 2016, San Francisco CA, June 2016.

Current Students

Amin Karbas

Sept 2021 - current

PhD student

Priyanka Mondal

March 2022 - current

PhD candidate
(Co-advised
with Prof. Arden)

Apostolos Mavrogiannakis

Sept 2022 - current

PhD student

Muhammad Hamza Shahzad

Sept 2022 - current

PhD student

Nihal Talur

Sept 2023 - current

PhD student

Alumni

Surya Keswani

Jan 2022 - May 2022

MSc student
Software Engineer at Amazon

Courses Teaching

Spring 2023: CSE108 Algorithmic Foundations of Cryptography

Winter 2023: CSE290X Cryptography and Computer Security

Fall 2022: CSE101 Introduction to Data Structures and Algorithms

Winter 2022: CSE108 Algorithmic Foundations of Cryptography

Fall 2021: CSE290X Cryptography and Computer Security