Associate Prof. Elena Andreeva, PhD, opens an external URL in a new window has been affiliated with the Institute for Logic and Computation, opens an external URL in a new window (E192) of the Faculty of Informatics, opens an external URL in a new window at TU Wien as an Associate Professor of Symmetric Cryptography since March 1, 2026.

Curriculum Vitae: Elena Andreeva comes originally from the beautiful coastal town of Balchik in Bulgaria. She received her Master’s degree in Computer Science from Saarland University, Germany, and earned her PhD in cryptography from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven) in 2010 with a thesis titled “Domain Extenders for Cryptographic Hash Functions, opens an external URL in a new window.” Her PhD studies were supported by the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO). After her PhD, she remained at COSIC, opens an external URL in a new window at KU Leuven, first as an FWO-funded postdoctoral researcher and later as a research expert. 2019 she was then appointed tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). She subsequently moved 2020 to Austria, where she worked as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Klagenfurt. In April 2021, she joined TU Wien in a tenure-track position in cryptography and has since qualified as an Associate Professor. Elena Andreeva has been actively involved in numerous international research collaborations and has published extensively in leading conferences and journals in cryptography and information security. She has contributed to major community efforts, including the NIST SHA-3 hash function design competition, the NIST Lightweight Cryptography competition, and the NIST-co-sponsored CAESAR competition on authenticated encryption. She has also played an active organizational role in the community, serving as organizer of the flagship symmetric cryptography conference FSE 2018 in Bruges, Belgium.

Her academic home is the Security and Privacy Research Group, opens an external URL in a new window (E192-06). There she conducts research in cryptography, with a primary focus on symmetric cryptography. Her work spans the theory, design, analysis, and practical application of symmetric cryptographic algorithms. In particular, she studies how data-expanding, -preserving, and -compressing cryptographic building blocks, such as forkciphers, block ciphers, permutations, and hash functions, can be designed and deployed securely and efficiently in real-world systems. 

Publications by Elena Andreeva in the Scopus, opens an external URL in a new window database and in ReposiTUm, opens an external URL in a new window.