Dr Vanessa Teague

Dr Teague is a cryptographer living and working on Wurundjeri land in southeastern Australia (near Melbourne). She is interested in cryptographic protocols that support a free and democratic society. She works on openly-available research and open-source software for supporting democratic decision making and empowering ordinary people to make choices about their own data.

Dr Teague’s research focuses primarily on cryptographic methods for achieving security and privacy, particularly for issues of public interest such as election integrity and the protection of government data. She was part of the team (with Chris Culnane and Ben Rubinstein) who discovered the easy re-identification of doctors and patients in the Medicare/PBS open dataset released by the Australian Department of Health. Joint work with Andrew Conway has identified several errors in deployed official Australian STV vote counting software, most of which was corrected as a consequence. She has co-designed numerous protocols for improved election integrity in e-voting systems, and co-discovered serious weaknesses in the cryptography of deployed e-voting systems in New South Wales, Western Australia and Switzerland.