Email: ffalzon(at)ethz(dot)ch

In July 2023 I started my postdoc in the Applied Cryptography group at ETH Zurich under the guidance of Prof. Kenneth Paterson. I am currently working on projects relating to encrypted databases, searchable encryption, and database security, and my latest works have focused on graph encryption schemes. My work is funded by the CYD Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship.

I recently obtained my Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Roberto Tamassia at Brown University and by Prof. Ben Zhao at UChicago.

I am also interested in the interplay between privacy technology and the European Union’s GDPR. I was previously a part of the Bridging Privacy Definitions working group, where we co-developed computer science and legal definitions to close the gap between the two fields.

In the summer and fall semester of 2022, I interned in the Blockchain group at IBM Zurich. Prior to this, I received my M.A. in Computer Science from UChicago under the guidance of Prof. David Cash and I received my B.A. in mathematics from Rutgers University.

Latest News

• April 2023: I successfully defended my thesis and will be joining the Applied Crypto group at ETH Zurich with generous funding form Armasuisse!
• June 2022: I’m honored to be giving a talk at ETH Zurich’s ZISC Lunch Seminar on June 30. The title of the talk is “An Efficient Query Recovery Attack Against a Graph Encryption Scheme.”
• May 2022: I’ll be attending IEEE S&P in San Francisco – my first in-person conference!
• March 2022: I will be attending the 2022 IACR-CROSSING School on Combinatorial Techniques in Cryptography in Valletta, Malta this coming April.
• December 2021: Excited to be returning back to Zurich from June to December 2022, this time as a PhD research intern at IBM Zurich!
• November 2021: Lilika and I jointly presented our work on approximate database reconstruction in 2D at CCS 2021.
• October 2021: I will be visiting Brown University until Spring 2023. (Go Brown Bears!)