Sabine Oechsner



I am an Assistant Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Theoretical Computer Science group. I'm also affiliated with the VUSec group.

My research interests are cryptography and provable security, as well as their intersection with formal methods and programming languages. I am particularly interested in making the worlds meet in a way that furthers our understanding of provable security: Instead of merely reproducing existing cryptographic proofs with tool support, my goal is to use formal verification as an opportunity to understand how to write better proofs with high assurance, both on paper and in a machine-checkable way.

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Bio

I received my PhD from Aarhus University in 2019 for my research on "Constructions and Proof Techniques for Secure Computation". My PhD was supervised by Ivan Damgård. During that time I also visited NTT Secure Platform Laboratories as well as IDC Herzliya (now Reichman University), working with Elette Boyle. I then stayed in Aarhus for a postdoc with Jesper Buus Nielsen before continuing my research in the Security and Privacy group at the University of Edinburgh.

While my PhD started out more traditionally by constructing cryptography, I am now leaning more towards the "proof techniques" side of provable security. Having been raised into cryptography at Aarhus University, I am particularly interested in cryptographic protocols and their security.

Contact

s.a.oechsner (at) vu.nl


How to pronounce my last name

The combination OE is an old spelling of the German letter Ö. The pronounciation is similar to the Scandinavian Ø or the French Œ, or the vowel in the English word learn. If you are in doubt, use O instead. The CHS in the middle of my name is pronounced like X or KS in English.

How to spell my last name

The way it is spelled on all my publications: Oechsner.

But isn't OE actually Ö?

Yes and no. In most German words, Ö is indeed used instead of OE. But names are not ordinary words, and they certainly don't care about modern spelling rules. There is even a German brewery with that spelling. (We are not related though.)