Dakshita
Khurana,
PhD
candidate
Department
of
Computer
Science,
UCLA
Can we provably immunize protocols against coordinated attacks on the internet? Can we verify that computation is performed correctly while preserving the privacy of underlying data? Can we enable mutually distrusting participants to securely compute on distributed private data?
These are some of the core challenges that lie at the heart of modern cryptography and secure protocol design.
In this talk, I will discuss my research that builds non-interactive secure protocols to address these challenges based on widely believed cryptographic hardness assumptions.
I will present new techniques that reimagine proofs of security to overcome known barriers and enable protocols that were previously believed to be impossible. These lay the foundations for preventing man-in-the-middle attacks, building variants of zero-knowledge proofs, and achieving other key cryptographic properties while for the first time, requiring only a single message from each participant.
Bio: Dakshita Khurana is a PhD candidate in the Computer Science Department at UCLA, where she is co-advised by Rafail Ostrovsky and Amit Sahai. She is currently supported by the UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship and is a recipient of the Cisco Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award.
She obtained her Master's from UCLA in 2014, and Bachelor's from IIT Delhi in 2012. She is interested in all aspects of cryptography, with a special emphasis on the foundations of cryptographic protocol design.
See her homepage for more information.