I am a faculty member in the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) group, and in the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute. I am also an affiliate faculty member in the Systems and Networks group, and an affiliate member of the Institute for Quantum Computing. My main research interests are in the areas of security and privacy, and specifically in creating privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) for the Internet.

I organize the CrySP Speaker Series on Privacy.

Some of my current and planned research:

• Privacy-preserving Communications Networks
• Off-the-Record Messaging (project website)
• Censorship Resistance
• Private Information Retrieval
• Efficient Zero-Knowledge Proofs

My publications

I am currently (well, will soon be) seeking interested graduate students to start in September 2025 or later. See the CrySP website if you are interested. Note: Please do not email me directly regarding applications. I get too many of these messages, and I am unable to respond to them.

Current PhD Students

• Anaïs Huang
• Chelsea Komlo (with Douglas Stebila)
• Miti Mazmudar
• Vecna

Current MMath Students

• Wei Dang

Alumni

• Vecna, Troll Patrol: Detecting Blocked Tor Bridges (M.Math, September 2024)
• Sajin Sasy, Privacy-Preserving Communications from Privacy-Preserving Computations (Ph.D., August 2024)
• Justin Tracey, Raising the Bar on Lowering Barriers: Improving Ease of Research and Development Contributions to Privacy Enhancing Technologies (Ph.D., August 2024)
• Kritika Iyer, Ghost Recommendations: A Protocol for Efficiently Enhancing User Privacy (M.Math, April 2024)
• Adithya Vadapalli (PDF, August 2023)
• Lindsey Tulloch, Lox: Protecting the Social Graph in Bridge Distribution (M.Math, May 2022)
• Stan Gurtler, PRSONA: Private Reputation Supporting Ongoing Network Avatars (M.Math, December 2021)
• Akshaya Mani (PDF, August 2021)
• Nik Unger, End-to-End Encrypted Group Messaging with Insider Security (Ph.D., August 2021)
• Steven Engler, Weaving a Faster Tor: A Multi-Threaded Relay Architecture for Improved Throughput (M.Math, August 2020)
• Chelsea Komlo, Walking Onions: Scaling Distribution of Information Safely in Anonymity Networks (M.Math, August 2020)
• Brittany Postnikoff, Robot Social Engineering (M.Math, July 2020)
• Miti Mazmudar, Mitigator: Privacy policy compliance using Intel SGX (M.Math, June 2019)
• Cecylia Bocovich (PDF, January 2019)
• Stefanie Roos (PDF, August 2018)
• Cecylia Bocovich, Recipes for Resistance: A Censorship Circumvention Cookbook (Ph.D., August 2018)
• Chris McKnight, StyleCounsel: Seeing the (Random) Forest for the Trees in Adversarial Code Stylometry (M.Math, January 2018)
• Justin Tracey, Building a Better Tor Experimentation Platform from the Magic of Dynamic ELFs (M.Math, October 2017)
• Tao Wang, Website Fingerprinting: Attacks and Defenses (Ph.D., January 2016)
• Tariq Elahi, Towards more Effective Censorship Resistance Systems (Ph.D., September 2015)
• Nik Unger, Deniable Key Exchanges for Secure Messaging (M.Math, May 2015)
• Sukhbir Singh, Large-Scale Emulation of Anonymous Communication Networks (M.Math, August 2014, with David Taylor)
• Casey Devet, The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Information-Theoretic and Computational Private Information Retrieval for Communication Efficiency (M.Math, August 2014)
• Ryan Henry, Efficient Zero-Knowledge Proofs and Applications (Ph.D., August 2014)
• Yizhou (Andy) Huang, Outsourced Private Information Retrieval with Pricing and Access Control (M.Math, May 2013)
• Mashael AlSabah, Network Performance Improvements for Low-Latency Anonymity Networks (Ph.D., April 2013)
• Hooman Mohajeri Moghaddam, SkypeMorph: Protocol Obfuscation for Censorship Resistance (M.Math, January 2013)
• Kevin Bauer (PDF, April 2012)
• Rob Smits, BridgeSPA: A Single Packet Authorization System for Tor Bridges (M.Math, January 2012)
• Femi Olumofin, Practical Private Information Retrieval (Ph.D., August 2011)
• Ryan Henry, Nymbler: Privacy-enhanced Protection from Abuses of Anonymity (M.Math, January 2011)
• Can Tang, An Improved Algorithm for Tor Circuit Scheduling (M.Math, July 2010)
• Aniket Kate, Distributed Key Generation and Its Applications (Ph.D., June 2010)
• Joel Reardon, Improving Tor using a TCP-over-DTLS Tunnel (M.Math, September 2008)
• Xiaoting Sun, Anonymous, Secure and Efficient Vehicular Communications (M.Math, October 2007, with Pin-Han Ho)

Curriculum Vitae

Academic genealogy

My Erdős and Bacon numbers