Contact
- Email: diane[dot]leblanc-albarel[at]kuleuven[dot]be
- Google Scholar
- ORCID
Recent Publications
About
Since November 2023, I have been a postdoctoral researcher in the COSIC group at KU Leuven. My research currently focuses on:
- Perceptual hash functions, which are used to identify similar but not identical media, such as detecting copyright violations or tracking child sexual abuse material.
- Time-Memory Trade-Off (TMTO) attacks, expanding on my PhD research to generalize TMTO techniques beyond Rainbow Tables.
- Authentication protocols and Password Manager protocols, with an emphasis on improving their security and efficiency.
My latest presentation about the European ChatControl regulation proposal:
For more information about ChatControl:
Learn more about my research:
Other Works and Events
Outreach Activities:
- Co-Author of a Book Chapter (in French):
- Chapter Title: Les mots de passe à bout de souffle ("The Password: At the End of Its Tether")
- Book Title: Le Calcul à Découvert
- Authors: Gildas Avoine, Diane Leblanc-Albarel
- Press Article (in French):
- Title: "How to choose a good password" (in French: "Comment choisir un bon mot de passe ?")
- Authors: Gildas Avoine, Diane Leblanc-Albarel
- Journal: The Conversation
- Read the article
Promoting Inclusion in Science:
Inclusion of women in science is an important question for me. To contribute to this cause:
- I am co-organizing a book circle for the IEEE Women in Engineering group at KU Leuven.
- Purpose: A reading circle for young researchers to explore books on feminist topics in Computer Science, share thoughts, and exchange experiences. The goal is to learn collectively and foster discussions in a supportive space.
- I participated in the L Codent, L Créent Program (2020–2021), conducting 20 hours of workshops teaching Python to middle school girls in Rennes. This initiative aimed to promote STEM careers and programming skills among young girls.
Previous Positions
I completed my PhD in October 2023 under the supervision of Gildas Avoine in the SPICY team at IRISA, Rennes. My PhD research was primarily centered on Time-Memory Trade-Off (TMTO) attacks, with a particular focus on the Rainbow Tables variant.
TMTOs are cryptographic techniques that balance computational costs and storage requirements to optimize certain types of attacks, such as password recovery or cipher key retrieval. My work included:
- Accelerating the precomputation phase of Rainbow Tables.
- Proposing new variants of Rainbow Tables algorithms that provide better trade-offs between attack success rates and resource consumption.
- Demonstrating the limits of TMTO attacks on both CPU and GPU architectures.
- Applying Rainbow Tables to analyze the security of communication ciphers and password managers.
Before my PhD, I graduated with a degree in Mathematical Engineering from INSA Rouen Normandie and a Master 2 in Information Systems Security from the University of Rouen Normandie.