In July, Dennis Dayanikli defended his dissertation on "Stronger Security for Password-Based Authentication Protocols" — congratulations!
His thesis studies asymmetric Password-Authenticated Key Exchange (aPAKE), a family of protocols that lets users authenticate with a password without ever revealing it to the server — closing the central weakness of traditional password-over-TLS, where servers see plaintext passwords and users remain exposed to phishing and credential leaks. Among other contributions, Dennis gave the first formal security proof for the most widely deployed aPAKE protocol and showed that many existing protocols in fact achieve stronger security guarantees than had been formally established. We are grateful to Prof. Manuel Barbosa and Prof. Stanislaw Jarecki for serving as external reviewers.
