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 currently exploring quantum provable security.
Recent Publications: ASIACRYPT 2026, CRYPTO 2026, EUROCRYPT 2026, ACM Asia-CCS 2026, PKC 2026, ToSC 2025-26, CiC 2025-26, JoC 2024, CiC 2024-25, ToSC 2023-24.
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 recent important publications.
- N. Datta, A. Dutta, S. Mandal, H. Nandi, A. Sinha: Post-Quantum Security of Keyed Sum of Permutations and Its Siblings, IACR ASIACRYPT 2026.
- N. Datta, H. Nandi, S. Pal, Y. Sasaki, P. Struck, M. Weishäupl, Generic Committing Attacks: Zero-Padded Ascon is Less Secure than Expected, IACR CRYPTO 2026.
- N. Datta, J. P. Degabriele, A. Dutta, V. Karadžić, H. Nandi: Rugged Pseudorandom Permutations with Beyond-Birthday-Bound Security, ACM ASIA-CCS 2026.
- R. Bhaumik, N. Datta, A. Dutta, A. Jha, S. Mandal, B. Mennink, H. Nandi, Y. Shen: How to Build a Short-Input Random Oracle from Public Random Permutations, EUROCRYPT 2026.
- B. C. Das, N. Datta, A. Dutta, D. Mukhopadhyay, A. Majumder, S. Patranabis, S. Samajder, L. Sardar: Efficient and Post-Quantum Conjunctive Dynamic SSE with Strong Privacy Guarantees, IACR PKC 2026.
- N. Datta, A. Dutta, S. Ghosh, E. List and H. Nandi: HCTR+: An Optimally Secure TBC-based Accordion Mode, IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology, Vol: 2025, Issue: 3.
- E. Andreeva, A. Bogdanov, N. Datta, A. Luykx, B. Mennink, M. Nandi, E. Tischhauser, K. Yasuda: The COLM Authenticated Encryption Scheme. Journal of Cryptology, 2024.
- N. Datta, S. Dey, A. Dutta, S. Mandal: Cascading Four Round LRW1 is Beyond Birthday Bound Secure. IACR Trans. Symmetric Cryptol. 2023(4): 365-390 (2023)
Contact: ✉ nilanjan.datta@tcgcrest.org / 📞 79807 20012