I am an EXDIGIT Research Associate (PostDoc) in the Privacy Engineering and Policy-Aligned Systems (PEPSys) group at the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, Austria. My research focuses on privacy-preserving authentication in vehicular ad-hoc networks and appying technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs and attribtue based credentials. This particularly includes:

designing short-lived credential systems that enable immediate accountability while preserving user privacy in vehicular and IoT networks.
developing adaptive security policies that adjust trust boundaries based on changing contexts, reducing reliance on any single component in distributed infrastructures.
creating flexible cryptographic protocols tailored to the diverse resource constraints and threat levels found across modern edge and IoT ecosystems.

Under the umbrella of the interdisciplinary EXDIGIT initiative, I aim to bridge my research in the context of applied cryptography, zero-trust models, and distributed system performance into the wider area of privacy engineering and policy-aligned systems.

Contact me at mahdi.akil@plus.ac.at.

Signature Publications

Akil, M., Martucci, L., Hoepman, Jh., 2024 A Secure and Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme with a Zero-Trust Approach to Vehicle Renting in VANETs
International Conference on Security and Privacy, pp. 114-127, 2024.
Akil, M., Martucci, L., Hoepman, Jh., 2023 Non-Interactive Privacy-Preserving Sybil-Free Authentication Scheme in VANETs
Symposium on Vehicles Security and Privacy (VehicleSec), 2023.
S. Fischer-Hübner, M. Akil, et al., 2021 Stakeholder Perspectives and Requirements on Cybersecurity in Europe
Journal of Information Security and Applications, pp. 102916–102931, 2021.
Akil, M., Islami, L., Martucci, L., Fischer-Hübner, S., Zuccato, A., Privacy-Preserving Identifiers for IoT: A Systematic Literature Review IEEE Access, Vol. 8, pp. 168470–168485, 2020.

Micro-CV

I received my Master’s degree in Networks and Security from Sapienza Università di Roma in 2018, developing novel techniques for data exfiltration and biometrics-based applications. I then got my doctoral degree in 2024 at Karlstad University, Sweden. During my PhD, I mostly focused on privacy-preserving cryptographic techniques for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). In March 2025, I was appointed as a post-doctoral researcher for EXDIGIT project by the University of Salzburg, Austria.