Please note: This seminar will take place in DC 1304.
Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Professor of Computer Science
Head, System Security Lab
Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
Over the past two decades, my research has explored the evolving landscape of secure and trustworthy computing, encompassing cryptographic foundations, systems and hardware security, and the emerging security and privacy challenges posed by AI-driven systems.
This talk reflects on that journey, highlighting key insights and lessons learned across different layers of the computing stack, from secure computation to software and hardware security, trusted computing architectures, and ultimately the broader domain of AI security. I briefly highlight the challenges we tackled that have had an impact not only within the scientific community but also across industry, influencing real-world security architectures and practices. Each phase revealed that true resilience cannot be achieved within a single abstraction layer; it requires holistic approaches that integrate cryptographic rigor, system-level robustness, and trustworthy architectures.
This path converges on securing AI-driven distributed systems, addressing emerging threats such as data and model poisoning, AI monocultures, and the rise of generative adversarial ecosystems, including the proliferation of deepfakes. The central theme remains constant: building and sustaining trust in a world where computation is increasingly distributed, autonomous, and adversarial. As technology continues to blur the boundaries between software, hardware, and AI, ensuring integrity and reliability demands adaptive and transparent protection methods that evolve with system complexity and autonomously detect, withstand, and recover from emerging threats.
Short biography: Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi is a Professor of Computer Science and head of the System Security Lab at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. He led the university’s Cybersecurity Center from 2020 to 2023 and has directed multiple Intel Collaborative Research Labs since 2012.
He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Saarland, Germany, as well as degrees in Industrial and Electrical Engineering. Before joining academia, he worked in R&D at leading IT companies, including Ericsson Telecommunications. His research spans security, privacy, and system design, with a lasting impact across academia and industry.
Prof. Sadeghi served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine and on the editorial boards of ACM TODAES, ACM TIOT, and ACM DTRAP. He is a member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) and the ACM Europe Council.
His achievements have been recognized with numerous awards, including the German Karl Heinz Beckurts Award for advancing Trusted Computing, the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contributions Award (2018), the Intel Academic Leadership Award (2021), the European Research Council Advanced Grant (2022), the DAC Service Award (2024), and the Synopsys Academic Award (2025).