Strong cryptography is easy to specify and hard to operate. We study the operating part.
Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman showed in 1976 that two parties can agree on a secret over a channel everyone can read. Today that idea secures nearly every connection on the Internet, but most real failures come not from broken mathematics — they come from expired certificates, leaked keys and slow rotations.
The Diffie Laboratory studies the operational side of cryptography in distributed systems: certificate and key lifecycles, the performance cost of new handshake algorithms, and the migration of production systems towards post-quantum key exchange.
Lab lead: Dr. Hannah Okafor
Measuring latency and packet-size overhead of hybrid key exchange on real paths with different MTUs and loss.
Detecting expiry risks, mis-issuance and rotation failures across large fleets before they cause outages.
Patterns and tooling for rotating service credentials in multi-region deployments.
We welcome joint research, student projects and dataset requests. Write to lab@diffie.network-labs.sm-ventures.ru.