Vincent Cheval awarded major EU research grant to investigate security of probabilistic systems

Posted: 17th November 2025

Associate Professor Vincent Cheval will co-lead an ambitious new research project backed by European Research Council (ERC) Synergy Grants, part of the EU's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme.
Synergy Grants foster collaboration between outstanding researchers, enabling them to combine their expertise , knowledge and resources to push the boundaries of scientific discovery.   

Of the 712 proposals submitted  this year, around 10% were successful. The grants are worth around €10.3 million each, and will support groups of researchers to tackle some of the most challenging scientific questions.  

Associate Professor Vincent Cheval will be co-leading the VePaSS project (Verification of Probabilistic Security Systems).   

Digital systems like online banking, electronic voting, messaging, and cloud storage have become critical infrastructure. But these systems are increasingly under attack, with ransomware, payment fraud, and data breaches posing risks to all of society. Such systems are kept safe by security protocols - rules computers follow behind the scenes to stay secure. To ensure their robustness, these security measures are rigorously tested and subjected to formal and mathematical verification within established security models. However, currently, verifying security systems requires simplifying their probabilistic behaviours (how they use randomness to stay unpredictable to attackers). 

This simplification can leave potential gaps and unknown weaknesses in systems that safeguard critical applications such as online banking and digital communications. At the same time , over the past two decades, probabilistic verification and game theory have been extensively applied to other domains, like networking, cyber-physical systems, and economics, for more nuanced and accurate analyses.    

The VePaSS project brings together computer scienceand maths to fix this problem. It aims to create new ways to verify security systems that use randomness. By combining recent advances inprobabilistic gameand computer modelling, the project hopes to make digital systems safer for everyone- improving trust, safeguarding the economy, and ensuring the integrity of elections.  

It’s really exciting to work with experts in different areas of computer science and maths. We're using ideas from security, game theory, and symbolic computation to check that real-world security systems – like those used in industry – are actually secure. At the same time, it requires us to solve some fundamental, long-standing questions in theoretical computer science. Associate Professor Vincent Cheval

The VePaSS project is a collaboration between four Principal Investigators (PIs); Vincent Cheval and Mahsa Shirmohammadi from the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), France, who is a visiting researcher to the department and a stipendiary lecturer at University College. They will be working in close collaboration with fellow PIs at the CNRS, Sébastien Tavenas and Véronique Cortier.

Further information about the 2025 ERC Synergy Grants can be found on the ERC website .