Dr Siamak Shahandashti

University of York

Dr Siamak Shahandashti is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Cyber Security

Siamak has extensive experience in designing cryptographic solutions to enhance security and privacy for applications such as electronic voting, auctions, and biometric authentication systems. He has also worked on the security and privacy of password managers, IoT devices, mobile phone sensors, contactless payment, and paper fingerprinting.

Siamak is interested in designing systems for improving security and privacy that are easy to use and accessible. He is working on designing usable password strength meters and human verifiable cryptographic codes.

Siamak is a core member of the York Interdisciplinary Centre for Cyber Security and an expert fellow of the UK Network on Security, Privacy, Identity, and Trust in the Digital Economy (SPRITE+)

He is a co-inventor on multiple patents including the first verifiable e-voting system trialled in the UK (patents US15582447, GB1607597) and paper fingerprinting (patent US15972922) with applications in banknote security. He led the design of the broadcast encryption deployed in millions of Thales’s Pay TV products worldwide. Siamak was part of teams who found vulnerabilities and fixed several systems, including the ISO/IEC11770-4 standard for password-based key exchange used in billions of devices, major mobile browser (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari) sensor access policies, and Bitcoin's Payment Protocol used by 100k+ merchants.

He is particularly interested in supervising students on the following topics:

• Using gamification to improve security and privacy in applications such as authentication and human verification

• Investigating and improving security and privacy in game environments

Research themes:

• Gamification 

• Games with a Purpose

• Game Security 

• Game Privacy 

• Game Analytics