Reyhaneh Safavi-Naeini

Rei Safavi-Naini

PhD, Fellow of IACR

Positions

Professor

Faculty of Science, Department of Computer Science

Assistant Head, Graduate Scholarships and Awards

Faculty of Science, Department of Computer Science

NSERC/TELUS Industrial Research Chair in Information Security

Faculty of Science, Department of Computer Science

Contact information

Email

rei@ucalgary.ca

Phone number

Office: +1 (403) 210-5492

Location

Office: ICT636

Background

Educational Background

Doctor of Philosophy Electrical Engineering, University of Waterloo, 1978

Biography

Rei Safavi-Naini is the NSERC/Telus Industrial Research Chair and Alberta Innovates Strategic Chair in Information Security. She co-founded (with Dr. Hugh Williams) Institute for Security, Privacy and Information Assurance at the University of Calgary in 2009 and served as its Director until January 2019. She joined he University of Calgary in 2007 as the iCORE Chair in Information Security, and before that was a Professor of Computer Science and the Director of Telecommunication and Information Technology Research Institute at the University of Wollongong, Australia.

She has over 400 published peer-reviewed papers in journals and conferences, has served as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (two times), ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC), IEEE Transactions on Secure and Dependable Computing, and is currently Associate Editor of IET Information Security and Journal of Mathematical Cryptology. She has served as Program Chair/co-Chair of numerous conferences, including Privacy, Security and Trust (PST 2017), ACM CCSW 2014, Financial Cryptography 2014, ACNS 2013 and Crypto 2012.

She has led major industry collaborative research and development teams in Canada and Australia, and has an. established collaborative research program with Telus Communications.

She has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from University of Waterloo, Canada.

Research

Participation in university strategic initiatives

Human dynamics in a changing world

Courses

Course number Course title Semester
CPSC 329 Explorations in Information Security and Privacy Fall 2022
CPSC 530 Information Theory and Security Winter 2023

Projects

Research and Professional Activities

Research Areas

  • Cryptography: Cryptography, Quantum-safe cryptography, Information theoretic cryptography
  • Information security: Communication and Network Security, Cloud Security, Distributed Ledger and Smart Contracts


Research Interests

Rei Safavi-Naini's research interests are cryptography, and information security and privacy. Her research is driven by the challenges of securing digital world in everyday life, and exploring fundamental limits of securing information communication system  and design of systems that achieve these limits. Her current research interests are information theoretic security, quantum-safe cryptography, network and communication security, Cloud security, and Distributed Ledger and Smart Contracts.


Professional Activities

Awards

  • Best Paper Award, ACM SIGCOMM 2018 Workshop of IoT Security and Privacy (IoT S&P). 2019
  • Japan Telecom System Technology Award, Japan Telecommunications Advancement Foundation.
  • IEEE Senior Member, 2014
  • Best Student Paper Award, 2012
  • Best Student Paper Award, 26th Anual IFIP WG 11.3 Working Conference on Data and Applications Security (DBSec 2012).
  • Outstanding Paper Award, 2012
  • Outstanding Paper Award, 2nd ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy CODASPY 2012.

Publications

View publications

In the News

  • "Can a university lead a digital revolution? Educating a workforce in a hyper-connected (Privacy and security in a connected world)".