We’re delighted to announce that Sebastian Watzinger received the Forschungspreis 2025 der Bundeskammer der Ziviltechniker:innen for his Master’s Thesis Differential Testing of Secure Multiparty Computation Compilers!

The Forschungspreis der Bundeskammer der Ziviltechniker:innen recognizes scientific work distinguished by technical expertise as well as by its timeliness and relevance to the civil engineering profession. Sebastian received his prize in the category of information technologies. For his master’s thesis, he was supervised by Maria Christakis, head of the Research Unit Software Engineering at TU Wien Informatics.

In his thesis, Sebastian focuses on improving the reliability of secure multiparty computation (MPC) compilers—an essential foundation for trustworthy privacy-preserving technologies. Secure multiparty computation (MPC) is a cryptographic technique that enables multiple parties to jointly perform computations while keeping their individual inputs confidential. Although each participant learns the final result, no sensitive input data is disclosed. This approach is increasingly used in privacy-critical domains such as healthcare, where hospitals collaboratively analyze patient data, financial fraud detection, where institutions cooperate without exposing proprietary information, and data-driven applications, including blockchain systems and machine learning, where correctness and trust are paramount.

Sebastian’s thesis addresses a crucial issue in secure multiparty computation (MPC): ensuring the correctness of the compilers on which these systems rely. Secure multiparty computation depends on specialized compilers that translate high-level, domain-specific programs into executable code. Because there is no standardized programming language for MPC, each compiler follows its own design and implementation approach, adding significant complexity. As a result, these compilers are particularly vulnerable to subtle logic errors that can silently produce incorrect results. Such errors not only weaken trust in privacy-preserving systems but may also lead to flawed conclusions and high-stakes decisions based on inaccurate outputs. Sebastian develops systematic methods to verify and strengthen the correctness of MPC compilers.

Congratulations to Sebastian on this extraordinary achievement!

About Sebastian

Sebastian Watzinger is a PhD student in the Research Unit Software Engineering. He completed his BSc, the Bachelor with Honors program, and his MSc in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, at TU Wien Informatics. His research centers on software testing, with a focus on cryptographic software for privacy-critical applications such as healthcare and finance. In these settings, even small implementation errors can have serious security and privacy implications, so finding and eliminating subtle bugs is a priority. Sebastian develops automated testing techniques tailored to cryptographic code. Instead of relying only on hand-written unit tests, he works on methods that can generate tests automatically, drive implementations into hard-to-reach edge cases, and reveal mistakes that are easy to miss during routine development. He’s particularly interested in fuzzing, differential testing, and metamorphic testing, and in how to adapt these approaches to the specific structure and assumptions of cryptographic implementations.

Curious about our other news? Subscribe to our news feed, calendar, or newsletter, or follow us on social media.