The professorial staff at HPI continues to grow

The Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) continues its academic growth: Starting September 1, Prof. Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup will be the Chair of the new research group “Cybersecurity – High-Assurance Systems” at the joint Digital Engineering Faculty of HPI and the University of Potsdam. Previously, she was Professor of Cybersecurity at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria. 

Her research focuses primarily on improving the security and efficiency of cryptographic systems. Prof. Chuengsatiansup's research has received numerous awards, most recently the first prize at the 2024 German IT Security Awards (Deutscher IT-Sicherheitspreis) for her contribution to “CryptOpt”. CryptOpt automatically generates secure and efficient cryptographic code with proof of correctness. The code generated by CryptOpt has already been integrated into Google products such as Chrome and other Chrome-based web browsers, which are used by billions of people worldwide. 

At HPI, Prof. Chuengsatiansup would like to focus primarily on automatic approaches to performing security analyses and optimizations. The increasing number of security-sensitive implementations makes manual inspection virtually impossible, so automation can mean major progress in this area. This includes, among other things, so-called side-channel analysis. This involves investigating potential information leaks that can arise from the interaction between cryptographic software and its environment. This can include, for example, noises from a processor or keyboard entries, which can also be used to read passwords.

Prof. Chuengsatiansup: “HPI is known to be home for excellent researchers and motivated students. I look forward to working with those people to push further research frontiers and produce impactful work.”

Prof. Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup studied “Computer Engineering” at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand and “Computer Science” at the University of Tokyo in Japan. She received her PhD from Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands, in 2017. As a postdoctoral researcher, she spent two years at Inria, France's leading public research institute for digital technologies, and at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. From 2019 to 2024, she was a Lecturer at the University of Adelaide and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne in Australia.  

With the appointment of Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup to the professorial staff, the Hasso Plattner Institute is strengthening its Security Cluster. In the coming months, the Digital Health Cluster will be expanded as well with additional professorships at HPI.