Stanford Security Lunch

Welcome to Security Lunch. We host speakers from both industry and academia to give talks related to applied cryptography, and system and network security.
If you're interested in attending, please sign up for the mailing list to receive updates about upcoming talks. There is an option to join virtually on Zoom.
If you're interested in giving a talk, we would love to have you! Please find more details in the About page.
You can find the upcoming and past talks for the current quarter below. We meet every Wednesday, 12 pm in CoDa E160.

Winter 2026

Upcoming

Abstract: Anonymous credentials allow users to obtain credentials from an organization and later prove their possession while disclosing as little information as possible. In practice, they are zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge of a valid signature. In this talk, we present the core design principles behind modern anonymous credential systems and introduce a new software stack aimed at simplifying their construction and deployment. The stack abstracts cryptographic complexity while remaining flexible enough to support a range of credential schemes, proofs and access policies. We illustrate its use through concrete real-world applications and frame this work within ongoing efforts to standardize zero-knowledge proofs and anonymous credentials for the web.

Bio: Michele Orrù is a chargé de recherche (assistant professor) at CNRS in Paris, France. Prior to that, he was a research scholar at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on limiting long-term mass storage of personal data and personally-identifying information. In the past, he has contributed to several open-source projects including Python, Debian, and Tor.

Past