Mariarosaria Barbaraci

Ph.D. student

Mariarosaria Barbaraci

Cryptology and Data Security Group
Institute of Computer Science
University of Bern
Neubrückstrasse 10
3012 Bern, Switzerland

Office 114
mariarosaria.barbaraci@unibe.ch

About

I’m a third-year PhD student in the Cryptology and Data Security Group at the University of Bern.

My research interests explore distributed cryptography and its practical integration in real-world systems, with a specific emphasis on blockchain technology. Currently, as part of my research project I’m actively contributing to the development of Thetacrypt, a distributed service that aims at offering threshold cryptography as a modular software component. I’m interested about practical challenges related to distributed cryptographic protocols (such as DKG and random beacon) in an asynchronous and Byzantine setting.

Additionally, I’m keen on privacy matters regarding digital identities, mainly how they are issued and how to preserve multiple services to correlate users’ data. Very recent work explores how to lower trust in issuers while maintaining privacy for users and Sybil resistance for service providers.

Prior to joining UniBe, I graduated in Computer Engineering at Università degli studi di Napoli Federico II. I did my master thesis on adversary emulation tools and NLP techniques on how to automatically extract CTI (Cyber Threat Intelligence) from unstructured text in collaboration with DESSERT Lab.

Teaching