Shaanan is a Senior Lecturer (equivalent to a U.S. Associate Professor) and the Deputy Head of School (Academic) for the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. Shaanan’s research centers on the interplay between computer systems and the law, with particular focus on applications of cryptography.

In 2019, Shaanan was the inaugural Geller Fellow of the Wharton Public Policy Initiative, with a summer placement in the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), where he assisted in the development of technology strategy within the commission.

In 2018 he served as a Cybersecurity Fellow working on U.S Federal technology policy in the office of Senator Ron Wyden. Prior to that, he spent three months at Facebook headquarters, working to ensure secure deletion of user data.

Shaanan completed his Ph.D. and MSE at the University of Pennsylvania in Computer & Information Science. He obtained a Master in Law from Penn Law, and his BSc and DipMus (Vocal Performance) from the University and Conservatorium of Melbourne respectively.

His research has received recognition in the form of the Best Paper Awards at ACM CCS, ACM/IEEE ICSE, and an Pwnie Award for best Cryptographic Attack and the faculty Excellence in Mid-Career Research Award. He is also the recipient of many teaching awards both at the national and university level including the CORE Award for Teaching (Early Career), the Edward Brown Award, and the Kelvin Medal.

Research Interests

Applied Cryptography, Computer Security, Public Interest Technology, Consumer Protection

Highlighted Publications

This list represents a mix of some recent work and older work that is exciting and representative of my research.

  1. β€œIt’s been lovely watching you”: Institutional Decision-Making on Online Proctoring Software. 2025 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP) (2025). Elisa Shioji, Ani Meliksetyan, Lucy Simko, Ryan Watkins, Adam Aviv and Shaanan Cohney.
  2. SoK: Trusted setups in cryptography, Financial Cryptography and Data Security, (2025), Faxing Wang, Shaanan Cohney and Joseph Bonneau.
  3. Trailblazer: Practical End-to-end Web API Fuzzing (Registered Report) . Proceedings of the 34th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (2025). Lianglu Pan, Shaanan Cohney, Toby Murray and Van-Thuan Pham.
  4. Detecting Excessive Data Exposures in Web Server Responses with Metamorphic Fuzzing, 46th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, (2024), Lianglu Pan, Shaanan Cohney, Toby Murray and Van-Thuan Pham, πŸ† Distinguished Paper Award.
  5. Watching the watchers: bias and vulnerability in remote proctoring software, 31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 22), (2022), Ben Burgess, Avi Ginsberg, Edward W Felten and Shaanan Cohney.
  6. Coin-operated capitalism, Columbia Law Review, 3 (2019), Shaanan Cohney, David Hoffman, Jeremy Sklaroff and David Wishnick.
  7. A systematic analysis of the Juniper Dual EC incident, Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, (2016), Stephen Checkoway, Jacob Maskiewicz, Christina Garman, Joshua Fried, Shaanan Cohney, Matthew Green, Nadia Heninger, Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, Eric Rescorla and Hovav Shacham, πŸ† Best Paper Award.

Teaching

TAing/Tutoring

PhD Students

Masters Research Students

Undergraduate Research Students

PhD Academic Siblings

Miscellaneous