We are the Security and Privacy Engineering (SPRING) Lab hosted at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy and at EPFL. Our research focuses on the following topics:

News and highlights

August 2026 Our paper End-to-End Encrypted Collaborative Documents won the “Internet Defense Prize” and the “Distinguished Paper Runner-up” award at USENIX Security 2026. Congrats Christian! Carmela has received a Distinguished Reviewer Award for her service as a PC member at USENIX Security 2026!

August 2025 Our papers Double-Edged Shield: On the Fingerprintability of Customized Ad Blockers and Characterizing and Detecting Propaganda-Spreading Accounts on Telegram appeared in USENIX Security 2025. The paper Characterizing and Detecting Propaganda-Spreading Accounts on Telegram won the “Distinguished Paper” award. Congrats Klim!

June 2025 Papers by our PhD students Saiid El Hajj Chehade (403 Forbidden? Ethically Evaluating Broken Access Control in the Wild) and Mathilde Raynal (On the Conflict Between Robustness and Learning in Collaborative Machine Learning) appeared in IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2025.

February 2025 Carmela has moved to the Max Planck institute on Security and Privacy where she is a Scientific Director. She is currently on leave from EPFL. Currently, the SPRING lab spans across two campus in Switzerland and Germany.

October 2024 Ana-Maria Cretu has received a Distinguished Reviewer Award for her service as a PC member at ACM CCS 2024!

May 2023 Carmela has been promoted as Associate Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL.

November 2022 Carmela has won the EPFL Latsis University Prize for exceptionally important contributions of her work.

Work with us

We are always looking for motivated PhD students and Postdocs, please check our open positions. If you would like to do your semester project or thesis in the SPRING lab, please check our student project proposals. We are also open to short internships at the lab at graduate and undergraduate levels.