Christoph Sprenger
Senior Scientist and Lecturer | Information Security | Computer Science | ETH Zurich

I am senior scientist and lecturer in Prof. David Basin’s Information Security group, which I joined in 2004.
My research interests lie in the intersection of formal methods and information security. I am working on the modeling and verification of distributed systems, including security protocols, secure networking protocols, concurrency control protocols, and consensus protocols. I am particularly interested in refinement techniques, (co-)inductive reasoning, compositional reasoning, and in combining model verification with code verification to obtain strong global guarantees about running systems. Tools that I am regularly using include the proof assistant Isabelle/HOL and the Tamarin prover.
Before I joined ETH Zurich, I was a postdoc at INRIA Sophia Antipolis in Prof. Gilles Barthe’s group (2002-2003) and at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science in Prof. Mads Dam’s group (2001-2002). I earned my PhD from EPFL in 2000, supervised by Prof. Claude Petitpierre. In 1992, I have obtained a Diploma (now MSc) in Computer Science from ETH Zurich.
selected publications
Journals
Conferences
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TACAS 2025Pushing the Limit: Verified Performance-Optimal Causally-Consistent Database TransactionsIn Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems - 31st International Conference, TACAS 2025, Held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2025, 2025To appear.