CHOW Sze Ming, Sherman

*SHB = Ho Sin Hang Engineering Building, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Research Interest
  • Cryptography
  • Distributed System Security
  • Privacy-Enhancing Technologies
  • Privacy-Preserving Big Data Analytics
Courses Taught

  • ENGG 5383 / IERG 5240 – Applied Cryptography
  • IERG 4150 – Introduction to Cryptography
  • IERG 5310 – Security and Privacy in Cyber Systems
  • CSCI 5590 / IERG 5590 / IEMS 5709 – Advanced Topics in Blockchain
  • IEMS 5710 – Cryptography, Info. Security and Privacy
  • IEMS 5725 – Blockchain and Applications
  • DSME 6788 – Cyber Security
  • IERG 4130 / ESTR 4306 – Introduction to Cyber Security
  • IERG 4210 – Web Programming and Security
  • IERG 4220 – Secure Software Engineering

CHOW Sze Ming, Sherman 周斯明教授

Associate Professor
MIEEE, MACM, IACR, IFCA, ISOC
BEng, MPhil (HKU), MS, PhD (NYU)
(852) 3943-8376
Room 808, SHB*
smchow [at] ie.cuhk.edu.hk
Website

Sherman S. M. Chow joined the Department of Information Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in November 2012 and received the Early Career Award 2013/14 from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC). He is also a founding program co-director of the MSc in Information Science and Technology Management (ISTM, Full-time) program, co-offered by the Department of Decisions, Operations and Technology.

Earlier in his career, he was a research fellow at the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo, a position he commenced after receiving his Ph.D. degree from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. Renowned institutions hosted him as an intern during his doctoral studies, including NTT Research and Development (Tokyo), Microsoft Research (Redmond), and Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory.

Motivated by paradoxical challenges, his research focuses on cryptography, security, and privacy. Among his contributions, he has published in and served on program committees for leading conferences including AsiaCrypt, CCS, CT-RSA, EuroCrypt, EuroS&P, Financial Cryptography, ICDCS, IJCAI, Infocom, NDSS, PETS, PKC, RAID, S&P, The Web Conference, and USENIX Security. Notably, he has served as area chair for AsiaCrypt 2025 and IEEE CNS 2023, and as senior program committee member for AAAI, IJCAI, PETS, and The Web Conference.

Currently, he is a Senior Area Editor of IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS) and previously served as Deputy Editor (Cryptography) of IET Information Security. He also serves on the editorial boards of ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS), IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), and the International Journal of Information Security (IJIS).

Opportunities to serve the research community came early in his career. Within his first year at CUHK, he began serving on the program committee of AsiaCrypt for six consecutive years starting in 2012, the program committee of CCS in 2014, and the editorial board of IEEE TIFS from 2015 to 2019.

Subsequent to receiving tenure, he was invited to serve on the program committees of Crypto 2019 and USENIX Security 2021, and was a member of the award committee for the Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies in 2019. Moreover, he is a European Alliance for Innovation (EAI) Fellow (2019, inaugural class). Citations and research impact have led to his inclusion in AMiner’s 100 Most Influential Scholars in Security and Privacy (2018) and Stanford University’s World’s Top 2% Scientists database since its inception in 2018.

Recent / Selected Publications
  • Andes Y. L. Kei*, Sherman S. M. Chow. SHAFT: Secure, Handy, Accurate, and Fast Transformer Inference. Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2025.
  • Harry W. H. Wong*, Jack P. K. Ma*, Sherman S. M. Chow. Secure Multiparty Computation of Threshold Signatures Made More Efficient. Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2024.
  • Jiafan Wang*, Sherman S. M. Chow. Unus pro omnibus: Multi-Client Searchable Encryption via Access Control. Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2024.
  • Minxin Du*, Xiang Yue, Sherman S. M. Chow, Tianhao Wang, Chenyu Huang, Huan Sun. DP-Forward: Fine-tuning and Inference on Language Models with Differential Privacy in Forward Pass. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2023.
  • Sherman S. M. Chow, Christoph Egger, Russell W. F. Lai, Viktoria Ronge, Ivy K. Y. Woo. On Sustainable Ring-Based Anonymous Systems. IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF) 2023.
  • Huangting Wu*, Sherman S. M. Chow. Anonymous (Hierarchical) Identity-Based Encryption from Broader Assumptions. Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS) 2023.
  • Cheuk Ting Li, Sherman S. M. Chow. Unconditionally Secure Access Control Encryption. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2023.
  • Lucien K. L. Ng*, Sherman S. M. Chow. SoK: Cryptographic Neural-Network Computation. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) 2023.
  • Minxin Du*, Xiang Yue, Sherman S. M. Chow, Huan Sun. Sanitizing Sentence Embeddings (and Labels) for Local Differential Privacy. ACM Web Conference (WWW) 2023.
  • Harry W. H. Wong*, Jack P. K. Ma*, Hoover H. F. Yin, Sherman S. M. Chow. Real Threshold ECDSA. Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2023.
  • Jiafan Wang, Sherman S. M. Chow. Omnes pro uno: Practical Multi-Writer Encrypted Database. Usenix Security 2022.
  • Xiuhua Wang* and Sherman S. M. Chow. Cross-Domain Access Control Encryption: Arbitrary-Policy, Constant-Size, Efficient. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) 2021.
  • Sherman S. M. Chow, Katharina Fech, Russell W. F. Lai*, and Giulio Malavolta. Multi-Client Oblivious RAM with Poly-Logarithmic Communication. IACR Advances in Cryptology – ASIACRYPT 2020.
  • Tao Zhang*, Huangting Wu*, Sherman S. M. Chow. Structure-Preserving Certificateless Encryption and Its Application. The Cryptographers’ Track at the RSA Conference (CT-RSA) 2019.
  • Sherman S. M. Chow, Alexander Russell, Qiang Tang, Moti Yung, Yongjun Zhao*, and Hong-Sheng Zhou. Let a Non-barking Watchdog Bite: Cliptographic Signatures with an Offline Watchdog. IACR Public Key Cryptography (PKC) 2019.
  • Russell W. F. Lai*, Raymond K. H. Tai*, Harry W. H. Wong*, Sherman S. M. Chow. Multi-key Homomorphic Signatures Unforgeable Under Insider Corruption. IACR Advances in Cryptology – ASIACRYPT 2018.
  • Russell W. F. Lai*, Christoph Egger, Manuel Reinert, Sherman S. M. Chow, Matteo Maffei, and Dominique Schröder. Simple Password-Hardened Encryption Services. USENIX Security Symposium 2018.
  • Yu-Chi Chen, Sherman S. M. Chow, Kai-Min Chung, Russell W. F. Lai*, Wei-Kai Lin, Hong-Sheng Zhou. Cryptography for Parallel RAM from Indistinguishability Obfuscation. ACM Conference on Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS) 2016.
Research Interest

  • Cryptography
  • Distributed System Security
  • Privacy-Enhancing Technologies
  • Privacy-Preserving Big Data Analytics
Courses Taught

  • ENGG 5383 / IERG 5240 – Applied Cryptography
  • IERG 4150 – Introduction to Cryptography
  • IERG 5310 – Security and Privacy in Cyber Systems
  • CSCI 5590 / IERG 5590 / IEMS 5709 – Advanced Topics in Blockchain
  • IEMS 5710 – Cryptography, Info. Security and Privacy
  • IEMS 5725 – Blockchain and Applications
  • DSME 6788 – Cyber Security
  • IERG 4130 / ESTR 4306 – Introduction to Cyber Security
  • IERG 4210 – Web Programming and Security
  • IERG 4220 – Secure Software Engineering