IAI

Dr. Nilanjan Datta

Associate Professor, IAI TCG CREST

Research Interests

I work in the field of symmetric key cryptography with a special interest in the design and analysis of symmetric ciphers. My research interest primarily includes the design and analysis of authenticated encryption, lightweight cryptography, provable security, security analysis of symmetric modes, searchable encryption, leakage resilience cryptography, etc. I am also interested in the cryptanalysis of primitives and symmetric quantum algorithms.

Education

I obtained my PhD and post-graduation in Computer Science from Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. I am extremely privileged to work under the supervision of Prof. Mridul Nandi. After PhD, I was an Institute Post Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kharagpur for two years, and Lecturer cum Post Doctoral Fellow at R. C. Bose Centre for Cryptology and Security, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata for one and a half years. During my doctoral tenure, I have spent two months in NTT Lab, Japan and two months in Fujitsu Laboratories of America for research collaboration.

Achievements

• I am one of the co-designers of the misuse resistant authenticated encryption mode ELmD, which is currently named COLM after merging with COPA. The design is selected as the winner in “Defense in Depth” category of the CAESAR competition. This work is also published in the Journal of Cryptology.
• I am a co-designer of the sponge based authenticated cipher Photon Beetle, which is one of the finalists of the ongoing NIST Lightweight Competition.
• I am also a co-designer of all the three finalists of Lightweight Cipher Design Challenge 2020 organized by National CoE, the joint initiative of the Data security council of India (DSCI) and the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY). 
  
  

Recent Academic Activities

• Delivered an invited talk at the workshop “Post-Quantum Cryptography: From Theory to Implementation” organized and hosted at the Dept. of Computer Science by IIT Kharagpur.
• Delivered an invited research talk at the workshop “Generic Attacks and Proofs in Symmetric-key Cryptography (GAPS) organized and hosted at NTU, Singapore.
• Added to the Program Committee of IACR Transactions on Symmetric key Cryptology (2025-26, 2024-25), FSE’27, FSE’26, ACM ASIA-CCS 2026.
• Served as the General and Program Chair, ASK 2024
• Served as a core organizing committee member of  ASIACRYPT 2024 and Organizing co-chairs of INDOCRYPT 2022.
• Serving as the Assistant Secretary of Cryptology Research Society of India (CRSI)
• Served as the RFAC co-ordinator at IAI, TCG CREST (2022-25).
• Served as a reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Designs, Code and Cryptography, IET Information Security, INDOCRYPT (2019, 2021, 2022, 2023), Cryptography and Communications Discrete Structures, Boolean Functions and Sequences – CCDS, IET, AMC, International Conference on Information Security and Cryptology – ICISC, 2017.

Publications

I have publications at top-tier conferences e.g., IACR CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT, ASIACRYPT, FSE, PKC, ACM ASIA-CCS, CT-RSA, and top-tier journals, e.g., Journal of Cryptology, IACR ToSC, IACR TCHES, DCC, IEEE TC, IACR CiC, etc. Please refer to my DBLP for the full list of publications. Here is a list of my important publications.

• E. Andreeva, A. Bogdanov, Nilanjan Datta, A. Luykx, B. Mennink, M. Nandi, E. Tischhauser, K. Yasuda: The COLM Authenticated Encryption Scheme. Journal of Cryptology, 2024 (doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00145-024-09492-8).
  
• Nilanjan Datta, Avijit Dutta, Mridul Nandi, Kan Yasuda: Encrypt or Decrypt? To Make a Single-Key Beyond Birthday Secure Nonce-Based MAC. IACR CRYPTO (1) 2018: 631-661
  
• Nilanjan Datta, Shreya Dey, Avijit Dutta, Sougata Mandal: Cascading Four Round LRW1 is Beyond Birthday Bound Secure. IACR Trans. Symmetric Cryptol. 2023(4): 365-390 (2023)
  
• Avik Chakraborti, Nilanjan Datta, Mridul Nandi, Kan Yasuda, Beetle Family of Lightweight and Secure Authenticated Encryption Ciphers. IACR Trans. Cryptogr. Hardw. Embed. Syst. 2018 (2): 218-241 (2018)
  
• Ritam Bhaumik, Nilanjan Datta, Avijit Dutta, Nicky Mouha, Mridul Nandi: The Iterated Random Function Problem. IACR ASIACRYPT 2017: 667-697
  
• Sikhar Patranabis, Nilanjan Datta, Dirmanto Jap, Jakub Breier, Shivam Bhasin, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, SCADFA: Combined SCA+DFA Attacks on Block Ciphers with Practical Validations, IEEE Trans. Computers 68(10): 1498-1510 (2019)
  
• Nilanjan Datta, Avijit Dutta, Kushankur Dutta: Improved Security Bound of (E/D)WCDM. IACR Trans. Symmetric Cryptol. 2021 (4): 138-176 (2021)
  
• Avik Chakraborti, Nilanjan Datta, Ashwin Jha, Cuauhtemoc Mancillas-Lopez, Mridul Nandi, Yu Sasaki, ESTATE: A Lightweight and Low Energy Authenticated Encryption Mode. IACR Trans. Symmetric Cryptol. 2020 (S1): 350-389 (2020)
  
• Nilanjan Datta, Avijit Dutta, Mridul Nandi, Goutam Paul: Double-block Hash-then-Sum: A Paradigm for Constructing BBB Secure PRF. IACR Trans. Symmetric Cryptol. 2018 (3): 36-92 (2018)
  
• Lilian Bossuet, Nilanjan Datta, Cuauhtemoc Mancillas-López, Mridul Nandi: ELmD: A Pipelineable Authenticated Encryption and Its Hardware Implementation. IEEE Trans. Computers 65(11): 3318-3331 (2016)
  
• Avik Chakraborti, Nilanjan Datta, Mridul Nandi: INT-RUP Analysis of Block-cipher Based Authenticated Encryption Schemes. CT-RSA 2016: 39-54
  

Contact: ✉ nilanjan.datta@tcgcrest.org / 📞 79807 20012