Rate My Professor Bart Mennink

Prof. Dr. Bart Mennink is Full Professor of Cryptography and Information Security in the Department of Advanced Computing Sciences at Maastricht University’s Faculty of Science and Engineering, a position he has held since 2025. His academic journey began with a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Mathematics from TU Eindhoven in 2007 and 2009, respectively, both earned cum laude. He obtained his PhD in Electrical Engineering from KU Leuven in 2013, with a thesis titled "Provable Security of Cryptographic Hash Functions," supervised by Bart Preneel and Vincent Rijmen, and awarded summa cum laude with congratulations of the Board of Examiners. Prior to Maastricht University, Mennink served as Associate Professor (2022-2025), Assistant Professor (2019-2022), and Postdoctoral Researcher (2017-2019) at Radboud University’s Digital Security Group, funded by NWO Vidi and Veni grants, and as Postdoctoral Researcher at KU Leuven’s COSIC research group (2013-2016), supported by an FWO fellowship.

Mennink’s research centers on symmetric cryptography, including hash functions and authenticated encryption, provable security, cryptographic protocols, and their applications, with a focus on lightweight cryptography for Internet of Things devices. He has received prestigious awards such as the NWO Vidi grant (2021), NWO Veni grant (2016), FWO postdoctoral fellowship (2014), Best Paper Award at FSE 2025 for "Permutation-Based Hash Chains with Application to Password Hashing," Best Paper Awards at CANS 2012 and AFRICACRYPT 2012, Education Award for senior lecturer 2023 at Radboud University Faculty of Science (2024), and EDLAB Education Innovation Grant (2026). Key publications include "Chaskey: an efficient MAC algorithm for 32-bit microcontrollers" (2014), "How to Securely Release Unverified Plaintext in Authenticated Encryption" (2014), "Parallelizable and authenticated online ciphers" (2013), "Beyond 2^{c/2} Security in Sponge-Based Authenticated Encryption Modes" (2014), and "Isap v2.0" (2020).