Dr Daniel Gardham
Academic and research departments
糖心Vlog Centre for Cyber Security, Computer Science Research Centre, School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering.About
Biography
Dr Daniel Gardham is a Lecturer in the 糖心Vlog Centre for Cyber Security at the 糖心Vlog and Co-Director of 糖心Vlog鈥檚 Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Education (ACE-CSE). His research specialises in applied cryptography, privacy-preserving technologies, and post-quantum security, with a focus on modern authentication protocols and emerging cybersecurity challenges. Alongside his research and leadership roles, he contributes extensively to computer security teaching, helping students build strong foundations in both theoretical and practical aspects of cybersecurity and digital privacy.
University roles and responsibilities
- Co-director of the ACE-CSE
- Open Day and Offer Holder Day Co-ordinator for Computer Science
My qualifications
Teaching
My teaching within the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering primarily focuses on the cybersecurity pathway. This year, I am delivering Privacy Enhancing Technologies, a relatively new module that examines the theoretical and practical techniques used to design complex systems while preserving user privacy. The topic is becoming increasingly important as advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, are deployed within sensitive domains such as healthcare and medicine.
I am also the module lead for the second-year Computer Security module, which provides students with a strong foundation in core security concepts, ranging from the underlying mathematical principles to real-world security protocols and organisational approaches to managing cyber threats. The module is designed to equip students with the knowledge and skills needed to progress confidently into the optional and specialist security modules available in the later years of their degree programmes.
See below for a full list of my teaching experience.
2025/26
COM3030 Privacy Enhancing Technologies
COM2041 Computer Security
2024/25
COM3030 Privacy Enhancing Technologies
COM1029 Data Structures & Algorithms
2023/24
COMM044 Symmetric Cryptography
COM3030 Privacy Enhancing Technologies
2022/23
COMM044 Symmetric Cryptography
Publications
Group Signatures are fundamental cryptographic primitives that allow users to sign a message on behalf of a predefined set of users, curated by the group manager. The security properties ensure that members of the group can sign anonymously and without fear of being framed. In dynamic group signatures, the group manager has finer-grained control over group updates while ensuring membership privacy (i.e., hiding when users join and leave). The only known scheme that achieves standard security properties and membership privacy has been proposed by Backes et al. CCS 2019. However, they rely on an inefficient revocation mechanism that re-issues credentials to all active members during every group update, and users have to rely on a secure and private channel to join the group. In this paper, we introduce a dynamic group signature that supports verifier local revocation, while achieving strong security properties, including membership privacy for users joining over a public channel. Moreover, when our scheme is paired with structure-preserving signatures over equivalence class it enjoys a smaller signature size compared to Backes et al. Finally, as a stand-alone contribution we extend the primitive Asynchronous Remote Key Generation (Frymann et al. CCS 2020) with trapdoors and introduce new security properties to capture this new functionality, which is fundamental to the design of our revocation mechanism.
Partially Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions (POPRFs) are 2-party protocols that allow a client to learn pseudorandom function (PRF) evaluations on inputs of its choice from a server. The client submits two inputs, one public and one private. The security properties ensure that the server cannot learn the private input, and the client cannot learn more than one evaluation per POPRF query. POPRFs have many applications including password-based key exchange and privacy-preserving authentication mechanisms. However, most constructions are based on classical assumptions, and those with post-quantum security suffer from large efficiency drawbacks. In this work, we construct a novel POPRF from lattice assumptions and the "Crypto Dark Matter" PRF candidate (TCC'18) in the random oracle model. At a conceptual level, our scheme exploits the alignment of this family of PRF candidates, relying on mixed modulus computations, and programmable bootstrapping in the torus fully homomorphic encryption scheme (TFHE). We show that our construction achieves malicious client security based on circuit-private FHE, and client privacy from the semantic security of the FHE scheme. We further explore a heuristic approach to extend our scheme to support verifiability, based on the difficulty of computing cheating circuits in low depth. This would yield a verifiable (P)OPRF. We provide a proof-of-concept implementation and preliminary benchmarks of our construction. For the core online OPRF functionality, we require amortised 10.0KB communication per evaluation and a one-time per-client setup communication of 2.5MB.
Older adults are particularly vulnerable to phishing attacks. Gamification has been shown to be less effective to develop confidence in distinguishing between genuine and phishing emails in this demographic. To overcome this, we present our novel, open source interactive training platform, Phish&Tips, based on a simulated inbox. Our multi-analysis approach provides comprehensive data that enables us to compare participant's self-assessed competence with their performance on the training platform. We present results based on pre-and post-training surveys, focus groups and the analysis of the training platform data (N = 37). Over half the participants demonstrated an improved understanding of various detection strategies and an increase in confidence in being able to interpret emails. However, these results were not evident in the analysis of the platform data. This disparity between participants' perceived knowledge and their performance on the platform highlights the challenges of applying their knowledge effectively.