research

goal

My research group builds computer systems that use cryptography to empower and protect their users. The projects that excite me the most:

  1. serve the interests of the end user,
  2. provide strong and precise forms of security, and
  3. have impact through real-world deployment.


recent projects

Private search. We built the Tiptoe search engine. Using Tiptoe, a client can search the web while hiding all information about its query from the search engine itself.

Private information retrieval. These systems allow a client to query a remote database server while hiding its query from the server. Our work has reduced the computational cost of these schemes using preprocesing and lattice-based cryptography. We have also strengthened the security properties they provide, and applied them to solve practical private-search problems.

Privacy-preserving collection of aggregate statistics. Our Whisper, Poplar, and Prio systems have made it possible to gather user data at large scale in a privacy-protecting way.

Secure authentication. Our Larch, SafetyPin and True2F, systems for authentication that provide strong hardware-backed security protections, while still protecting against a wide class of hardware faults and backdoors.

For more details, please see my full list of publications.


talks

Here is a list of talks I have given. Some have links to the slides and/or videos.


disclosure

A variety of companies and government agencies fund my group's research. See the "acknowledgements" sections of my papers for details on funding sources.