research

I build cryptographically secure systems and design protocols that address privacy concerns in emerging technologies. My research combines cryptography with system design, and from this vantage point, I work on a variety of topics which includes

• Secure and Robust Technologies for Autonomous Vehicles: Smart transportation is a fast-emerging technology that will impact everyday life in the near future. Due to the enormous safety implications of these technologies, it is important to make smart transportation systems robust against all forms of adversarial attacks. My research aims to address this problem through robust joint perception mechanisms (sometimes private). As an example, I build new tools to compare outputs of vision sensors, e.g., LIDAR points clouds, enabling better visibility and fault detection in connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs).

• Incentivized, Collaborative Information Sharing: I research private mechanisms for sharing information among mutually-untrusting parties at different vantage points to make better decisions. One such application domain is collaborative threat detection, where organizations can jointly detect coordinated attacks and reduce false positives. As part of this research, on the theoretical end, I develop new theory for private fuzzy matching of vectors (e.g., feature vectors corresponding to attack identifiers) using statistical distance metrics. On the practical end, I research incentive mechanisms, and techniques to reliably crowdsource information from a quorum of experts.

• Deniable Communication and Storage: I research storage and communication systems that retain privacy of sensitive information – either stored at rest with full-disk encryption, or in transit with end-to-end encryption – even when the encryption keys are leaked due to coercion, backdoors, vulnerabilities, etc. To this end, I build block stores, filesystems and firmware for secure storage, and propose mechanisms to make end-to-end encrypted communication systems more resilient to backdoors and key compromise.

• Secure Cloud Computing: I research different aspects of cloud security, including secure storage technologies, databases, and virtualization. I design cryptographic mechanisms that protect confidentiality of cloud-hosted data against side-channels resulting from access pattern leakage, and build storage and database technologies that protect data integrity against malicious service providers.

As part of my research, I often find myself trying to answer questions such as

• how do we scale cryptographic tools to handle new data types and computational tasks in clouds and big data?
• how can we optimize cryptographic protocols to enable reliable and private communication between low-resource parties, e.g., cyber-physical systems?
• how do we make private end-to-end communication (and storage) truly private in the face of intrusive privacy laws, censorship, coercion and backdoors?