Research Interests

My research interests lie at the intersection of network protocol design, distributed systems, and applied cryptography. I am particularly interested in developing communication protocols that resist traffic analysis and network surveillance, designing secure peer-to-peer communication architectures, and exploring hybrid transport systems that bridge different network technologies. My work on the TYPHOON protocol — a UDP-based transport-layer protocol that eliminates all cleartext fields, generates decoy traffic, and mimics generic protocol behavior to make traffic identification economically impractical — exemplifies this focus. My parallel work on Airwire, a hybrid messenger that seamlessly switches between web API and SMS/MMS transport with end-to-end encryption, demonstrates my interest in practical secure communication across heterogeneous networks. I aim to contribute to making private, resilient communication systems more accessible through rigorous protocol specification and formal analysis.

Keywords: Network protocol design; Distributed systems; Peer-to-peer networks; Applied cryptography; Traffic analysis resistance; Network observability; Traffic obfuscation; Secure messaging; Post-quantum cryptography; Hybrid transport systems

Papers

Aleksandr Sergeev · TBD — targeting USENIX Security, IEEE S&P, NDSS, or PoPETs (in preparation)

Specifies TYPHOON, a UDP-based transport-layer protocol designed to make traffic identification impractical. All packets are fully encrypted with no cleartext fields; decoy traffic and fake protocol headers mimic generic network behavior. The protocol uses a session manager / flow manager architecture, supports multiple proxy endpoints, and offers post-quantum readiness via Classic McEliece KEM alongside XChaCha20-Poly1305 and AES-GCM-256 symmetric modes. Includes a Rust reference implementation.

Technical Reports

Aleksandr Sergeev · supervised by Olivier Aycard, Grenoble Computer Science Laboratory (LIG), UGA

Compared two person detection methods for 2D LiDAR data: a heuristic cluster-based algorithmic detector and a deep learning DROW detector based on 1D convolutional architecture. Developed the Follow-the-DROW (FTD) library, ROS package, and Docker image for detector comparison and deployment on the RobAIR platform. Identified significant annotation quality issues in the DROW dataset affecting evaluation reliability; full quantitative comparison was not completed due to computing resource constraints.

Theses

Simulation Framework Code Generation2025
Master of Science · Université Grenoble Alpes / Grenoble INP - Ensimag · supervised by Camille Bellot, Ansys (acquired by Synopsys)

Designed and implemented a schema-driven code generation system for Ansys's simulation framework (DPF), replacing manually maintained client libraries in Python, C++, and C# with auto-generated code from a single schema definition. Evaluated multiple schema technologies (FlatBuffers, Protobuf, Cap'n Proto, etc.), designed a front-end/back-end generation pipeline with intermediate representation, and integrated the generator into existing CMake and Poetry build systems.

Bachelor of Technology · St. Petersburg Electrotechnical University (ETU) · supervised by Mikhail M. Zaslavsky

Developed a monitoring system for Sosnowsky's hogweed (Heracleum sosnowskyi), an invasive phototoxic plant species. The system combines a Django/PostGIS server backend, a Flutter/BLoC mobile client for field reporting, and a TensorFlow-based ML image classification module for species identification. The classifier uses MobileNetV2 transfer learning (pretrained on ImageNet) to distinguish three classes (hogweed, cetera, other) over a dataset of 7100 images per class sourced from OpenImages and iNaturalist, achieving 92% accuracy with 0.4s inference time and a 79.3 MB TensorFlow Lite model. The backend uses PostGIS/PostgreSQL for geospatial tracking of reported sightings.