About me

Mahdi Rahimi is a postdoctoral researcher at the COSIC research group, KU Leuven, working on anonymous communication, mix networks, privacy-preserving systems, and applied cryptography. He is the recipient of a 3-year FWO Postdoctoral Fellowship, starting in November 2026.

He received his PhD from KU Leuven in August 2026 under the supervision of Prof. Claudia Diaz, graduating summa cum laude with the congratulations of the Board of Examiners (awarded to the top 5% of KU Leuven doctorates). His PhD focused on Latency Optimization and Anonymity Enhancement in Mix Networks. During his PhD, he received the Best Student Paper Award at ACNS 2025 and the Distinguished Artifact Award at NDSS 2026.

Research Interests

• Anonymous Communications (mixnets)
• Privacy-Preserving Systems
• Applied Cryptography

Awards & Honors

• Recipient of a 3-year FWO Postdoctoral Fellowship, November 2026, Leuven, Belgium.

• Graduated with a PhD summa cum laude with the congratulations of the Board of Examiners (awarded by KU Leuven only to the top 5% of doctorates), August 2026, Leuven, Belgium.

• Distinguished Artifact Award, NDSS 2026: “When Mixnets Fail: Evaluating, Quantifying, and Mitigating the Impact of Adversarial Nodes in Mix Networks”, February 2026, San Diego, California.

• Best Student Paper Award, ACNS 2025:
  “PARSAN-Mix: Packet-Aware Routing and Shuffling with Additional Noise for Latency Optimization in Mix Networks”, June 2025, Munich, Germany.

• Shortlisted for Best Paper, CANS 2024:
  “LARMix++: Latency-Aware Routing in Mix Networks with Free Routes Topology”, September 2024, Cambridge, UK.

• Ranked 1st among all graduates in the Master of Secure Communications and Cryptography Engineering program, Sharif University of Technology, August 2020, Tehran, Iran.

• Member of the Iran National Elites Foundation, October 2018, Tehran, Iran.

• Ranked 1st among 125 undergraduate Electrical Engineering students, K. N. Toosi University of Technology, November 2017, Tehran, Iran.

• Ranked among the top 0.8% in Iran’s National University Entrance Exam for Undergraduate Studies, among more than 223,000 students, August 2014, Tehran, Iran.

Teaching Experience

Lecturer

• Advanced Privacy, COSIC, KU Leuven
  Winter 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026 (partial lecturer)

Teaching Assistant — KU Leuven

COSIC, Master of Cybersecurity, 2021–2026

Courses:

• Basic Cybersecurity
• Privacy and Big Data
• Privacy Technologies
• Advanced Privacy

Responsibilities include organizing exercise sessions, supervising and mentoring students, and grading assignments and exams.

Academic Service

• 2026-27: USENIX Security ‘27, Euro S&P ‘27, PETs ‘27 (External Reviewer), IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (TNSM)

• 2025: IMPACT 2025 (co-located with NDSS 2025), ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (TNSM)

• 2024: Session Chair, CANS 2024, Cambridge

Recent News

September 2026

• A paper accepted at NDSS 2027.

August 2026

• I graduated with a PhD from COSIC, KU Leuven, summa cum laude.

March 2026

• A paper accepted at the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) 2026.

February 2026

• Award:
  The paper “When Mixnets Fail: Evaluating, Quantifying, and Mitigating the Impact of Adversarial Nodes in Mix Networks” received the Distinguished Artifact Award at NDSS 2026, San Diego, California.

  

• Two papers accepted in NDSS 2026:

  • “When Mixnets Fail: Evaluating, Quantifying, and Mitigating the Impact of Adversarial Nodes in Mix Networks” at the 33rd Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium, San Diego, California.

  • “OptiMix: Scalable and Distributed Approaches for Latency Optimization in Modern Mixnets” at the 33rd Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium, San Diego, California.

🧾 Poster Presentation

Title: Enhancing Applicability of Mix Networks
Event: KU Leuven ESAT Department — External Advisory Board Meeting
Date: February 5^th, 2026
Link: View Poster (PDF)

📄 Paper Presentations

“DP-Mix: Differentially Private Routing in Mix Networks”
Presented at the 41st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), Hawaii, December 2025.

🏆 Awards

• Best Student Paper Award:
  “PARSAN-Mix: Packet-Aware Routing and Shuffling with Additional Noise for Latency Optimization in Mix Networks”
  Received at ACNS 2025, Munich, June 2025.

Contact

If you are interested in my research or any of the topics mentioned above, please don’t hesitate to reach out via email: mahdi.rahimi@esat.kuleuven.be