I am an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Before, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Systems Security and Privacy research group at Microsoft Research, Redmond where I spent one year. I received my PhD in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin, where I was advised by Michael Walfish and Lorenzo Alvisi.
Research Interests
My research interests are in computer systems, security, and privacy. I enjoy taking theoretical constructs from the literature (e.g., cryptography) and carefully applying them to add strong security and privacy properties to computer systems. An example system that I built is Popcorn: a Netflix-like media delivery service that serves movies without knowing which movies users are requesting!
Teaching
- CS170 (Undergraduate) Operating Systems: Winter 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Winter 2022
- CS293G (Graduate) Computing on encrypted data: Spring 2019, Winter 2020
- CS178 (Undergraduate) Introduction to Cryptography: Winter 2021
Publications
SPG: Structure-Private Graph Database via SqueezePIR
VLDB 2023, Vancouver, Canada, August 2023.
Pantheon: Private Retrieval from Public Key-Value Store
VLDB 2023, Vancouver, Canada, August 2023.
INSPIRE: In-Storage Private Information Retrieval via Protocol and Architecture Co-design
ISCA 2022, New York City, NY, June 2022.
Towards an efficient system for differentially-private, cross-device federated learning
ResilientFL 2021, Virtual event, Oct 2021. [Talk, Slides]
Coeus: A system for oblivious document ranking and retrieval
SOSP 2021, Virtual event, Oct 2021. [Talk, Code]
Addra: Metadata-private voice communication over fully untrusted infrastructure
OSDI 2021, Virtual event, July 2021. [Talk and slides, Code]
Proving the correct execution of concurrent services in zero-knowledge
OSDI 2018, Carlsbad, CA, October 2018.
Toward practical and private online services
PhD dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, August 2017.
Pretzel: Email encryption and provider-supplied functions are compatible
ACM SIGCOMM 2017, Los Angeles, CA, August 2017. [Slides, Talk]
Scalable and private media consumption with Popcorn
NSDI 2016 , Santa Clara, CA, March 2016. [Slides, Talk]
Taming uncertainty in distributed systems with help from the network
EuroSys 2015, Bordeaux, France, April 2015.
Improving availability in distributed systems with failure informers
NSDI 2013, Lombard, IL, April 2013. [Slides, Talk]
Evolution of an Online Social Aggregation Network: An Empirical Study
IMC 2009, Chicago, IL, November 2009.
Characterization of FriendFeed - A Web-based Social Aggregation Service
ICWSM 2009, San Jose, CA, May 2009.
Professional service
- Program committee, IEEE ICDCS 2021
- Program committee, DSN Workshop on Dependable and Secure Machine Learning (DSML) 2021
- Program committee, ACM CCS 2020
- Program committee, IEEE ICDCS 2020
- Program committee, DSN Workshop on Dependable and Secure Machine Learning (DSML) 2020
- Journal reviewer, Computers and Security 2020
- Journal reviewer, Signal processing: Image communication 2019
- Scholarship committee, ACM SOSP 2019
- External review committee, USENIX NSDI 2018
- Scholarship committee, ACM SOSP 2017
- External review committee, ACM CCS 2017
- Journal reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) 2017
Students
Current
- Ishtiyaque Ahmad (PhD student; co-advised with Divy Agrawal and Amr El Abbadi)
- Jaber Daneshamooz (PhD student)
- Lawrence Lim (PhD student; co-advised with Divy Agrawal and Amr El Abbadi)
- Kunlong Liu (PhD student)
Former
- Vishwajeet Agrawal (Undergrad research intern)
- Rakshith Gopalakrishna (Masters; joined Algorand)
- Aditya Gulati (Undergrad research intern)
- Utkarsh Gupta (Undergrad research intern)
- Muqsit Nawaz (Masters; joined TikTok)
- Sandy Schoettler (Undergrad research assistant)
- Andrew Thompson (Undergrad research assistant; joined AppFolio)
- Richa Wadaskar (Masters; joined Snap)
- Yuntian Yang (Undergrad research assistant)