Koustav Kumar Mondal

About me

I work where hardware security meets distributed systems. My doctoral research builds a trust architecture that starts in silicon and ends in consensus: physical unclonable functions (PUFs) give each device an identity that cannot be copied, post-quantum cryptography keeps that identity safe against future attackers, and blockchain consensus lets thousands of devices agree on what is true.

Alongside the thesis I work on quantum-aware security and quantum-driven sensing for connected vehicles. I like building the testbeds as much as the theory, from a 16-node ARM/x86 edge cluster to vehicle-ECU hardware-in-the-loop rigs.

I am currently a Visiting Researcher at the qCLOUDS Lab, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, where I work on fault-tolerant distributed quantum computing: keeping computations correct when they are split across many networked quantum processors.

See my publicationsContact me
Koustav Kumar Mondal

Research domains

Research experience

  1. Sep 2026 – present

    Visiting Researcher

    qCLOUDS Lab, School of Computing and Information Systems, Faculty of Engineering and IT, The University of Melbourne

    qCLOUDS LabCISFEITUniversity of Melbourne

    • Research on fault-tolerant distributed quantum computing.
  2. Dec 2024 – Aug 2026

    Senior Research Fellow

    VANET Lab, Dept. of CSE, IIT Jodhpur

    • Worked on the joint DST–NSF project Towards Secure and Resilient Collaborative Autonomous Driving (CoAD): collaborative sensing and path planning.
    • Designed a friction-aware kinematic model for mobile robots and LoRa-based localization for GPS-denied environments.
    • Mentored 2 M.Tech students, 6 B.Tech students and 11 interns across hardware security, blockchain and robotics.
  3. Jan 2022 – Dec 2024

    Junior Research Fellow

    VANET Lab, Dept. of CSE, IIT Jodhpur

    • Researched the MOST Taiwan–GITA India project on lightweight anonymous authentication for the Internet of Vehicles.
    • Designed a PUF-based, hardware-assisted authentication protocol and led integration of a decentralized blockchain ledger.
    • Built and ran distributed testbeds on NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX, Raspberry Pi and UP Squared Edge boards.
  4. Oct 2021 – Jan 2022

    Project Associate II

    Dream Lab, Dept. of Computational Data Sciences, IISc Bangalore

    • Built MLOps pipelines in a two-person team for the IBM–IISc Hybrid Cloud initiative.
    • Deployed and orchestrated ML systems with Kubernetes, Apache Airflow and Kubeflow.

Education

  1. 2022 – present

    Ph.D., Centre for AIoT and Applications

    Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur

    Thesis: Towards a Hardware-Anchored Blockchain-Enabled Trust Architecture for Secure and Resilient IoT and Cyber-Physical Systems

  2. 2019 – 2021

    M.Tech, Information Technology (IoT specialization)

    Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology (formerly WBUT)

    First position in the programme

    Thesis: Security Enhancement for Internet of Things Using Blockchain

  3. 2015 – 2019

    B.Tech, Electronics and Communication Engineering

    Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology (formerly WBUT)

    Thesis: Smart Grid Technology with Smart Devices and Smart Applications for Smart Cities

Skills and tools

From soldering iron to Kubernetes: the hardware, software and infrastructure I use to build and test secure systems.

Programming

5 tools
  • Python
  • Verilog
  • Embedded C
  • MATLAB
  • Solidity

Hardware security

4 tools
  • pypuf (Arbiter, XOR-APUF, RO, SRAM PUF)
  • SRAM PUF fingerprinting on ESP32-S3
  • Intel MAX 10 FPGA
  • Quartus Prime

Embedded boards

8 tools
  • NVIDIA Jetson (Nano, AGX, Xavier NX)
  • Raspberry Pi (Pico, 3B, 4, 5)
  • STM32
  • ESP32 / ESP8266
  • Arduino
  • Google Coral
  • UP Squared Edge
  • Tang Nano 20K

DevOps & infrastructure

9 tools
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • Proxmox VE
  • Apache Airflow
  • Kubeflow
  • ArgoCD
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • XCP-ng

Blockchain & IoT

5 tools
  • Ethereum
  • Truffle
  • Ganache
  • MQTT / Mosquitto
  • Node-RED

Quantum & cloud

4 tools
  • Qiskit
  • IBM Quantum
  • AWS
  • Linux

Honours and awards

  • 2026IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES) Student and Young Professional Congress Travel Grant
  • 2025Invited hands-on tutorial instructor, ACM Summer School on IoT and Next Generation Networks, KARE Madurai
  • 2024Invited research visit, Cryptology and Network Security Lab, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan
  • 20242nd Prize, Industry Day Project Showcase, IIT Jodhpur
  • 20211st Position, M.Tech IT (IoT specialization), MAKAUT
  • 2020Invited talk, “Gateway of Blockchain-IoT Meets the Edge Computing Paradigm”, iTIPS 2020
  • Selected participant, Karyashala “IoT in Edge-Cloud Continuum”, IIT Indore
  • 1st Prize, Robotics and Internet of Things Workshop, IIT Kharagpur

Professional service

Journal reviewer

  • Scientific Reports (Nature Portfolio)
  • Internet of Things (Elsevier)
  • Journal of Network and Systems Management
  • Cluster Computing
  • The Journal of Supercomputing
  • Wireless Personal Communications
  • Journal of King Saud University – CIS
  • Discover Internet of Things
  • Discover Artificial Intelligence
  • Journal of Big Data

Technical programme committee

  • Member: IEEE WCNC 2024, 2025 and 2026
  • Reviewer: BTS-I2C 2025 and 2026
  • Reviewer: IEEE ICECIE 2025

Membership

  • Graduate Student Member, IEEE
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