I am an assistant professor in computer science at Stanford University. I am broadly interested in building secure systems using cryptography.
I was a postdoc at MIT in computer science with Henry Corrigan-Gibbs. Before that, I completed my Ph.D. in computer science at UC Berkeley where I was advised by Raluca Ada Popa and Ion Stoica. I finished my B.S. and M.S. in computer science at Stanford University where I was advised by David Mazières. A longer version of my bio is available here.
Research interests
- Protecting user accounts from compromised single sign-on providers, backup providers, and authentication tokens.
- Building private web infrastructure, including private web search and private web browsing.
- Privately collecting and processing data from many users for running analytics and computing recommendations.
- Supporting queries on encrypted data with strong privacy for keyword search, timeseries analytics queries, and horizontally scalable key-value stores.
Industry impact
- We collaborated with Signal to construct a secret recovery system that splits secrets across different secure enclaves managed by different cloud providers.
- We helped Signal adapt some of our techniques for horizontally scalable key-value stores for private contact discovery.
- Apple's Enhanced Visual Search uses techniques that build on our work on private web search.
Students
PhD students
- Ryan Cottone
- Ihyun Nam (co-advised with David Mazières)
Rotation students
- Mark Chen (Fall 2026)
BS and MS students
- Aarzoo Aggarwal
- Vidur Gupta
- Nicholas Ingino
- Su Kara
- Aditesh Kumar
Former students
- Naomi Boneh (MS 2026) → Cursor
Publications
2026
Nudge: A Private Recommendations Engine
USENIX Security 2026
Heli: Heavy-Light Private Aggregation
USENIX Security 2026
Chorus: Secret Recovery with Ephemeral Client Committees
IEEE Security & Privacy 2026
2025
LegoLog: A Configurable Transparency Log
EuroS&P 2025
2024
Secure Systems from Insecure Components
PhD Thesis
ACM SIGSAC Doctoral Dissertation Award Runner-Up
Secret Key Recovery in a Global-Scale End-to-End Encryption System
OSDI 2024
2023
Lightweb: Private web browsing without all the baggage
HotNets 2023
Private web search with Tiptoe
SOSP 2023
Accountable authentication with privacy protection: The Larch system for universal login
OSDI 2023
2022
Reflections on Trusting Distributed Trust
HotNets 2022
Waldo: A Private Time-Series Database from Function Secret Sharing
IEEE Security & Privacy 2022
2021
Snoopy: Surpassing the Scalability Bottleneck of Oblivious Storage
SOSP 2021
2020
DORY: An Encrypted Search System with Distributed Trust
OSDI 2020
SafetyPin: Encrypted Backups with Human-Memorable Secrets
OSDI 2020
2019
True2F: Backdoor-resistant authentication tokens
IEEE Security & Privacy 2019
First Place, CSAW US-Canada Applied Research Competition
Preprints
Reducing Participation Costs via Incremental Verification for Ledger Systems
* denotes equal first-authors
Talks
Splitting Secrets for Encrypted Backups
- NTT (Sunnyvale, CA): August 2026
- Simons Institute (Berkeley, CA): March 2026
Encrypted Backups for Signal Messenger
- EUROCRYPT Cryptographic Applications Workshop (Madrid, Spain): May 2025
- MIT Security Seminar (Cambridge, MA): April 2025
Secure Systems from Insecure Components
- Dissertation talk (Berkeley, CA): May 2024
- Harvard University (Cambridge, MA): April 2024
- UT Austin (Austin, TX): April 2024
- Columbia University (New York, NY): April 2024
- CMU (Pittsburgh, PA): April 2024
- University of Washington (Seattle, WA): March 2024
- UC San Diego (San Diego, CA): March 2024
- MIT (Cambridge, MA): March 2024
- Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA): March 2024
- Princeton University (Princeton, NJ): March 2024
- University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA): February 2024
- New York University (New York, NY): February 2024
- Cornell University (Ithaca, NY): February 2024
- Brown University (Providence, RI): February 2024
Lightweb: Private web browsing without all the baggage
- HotNets (Cambridge, MA): November 2023
Private web search with Tiptoe
- Mozilla Security Research Summit (San Diego, CA): March 2025
- New York Crypto Day (New York, NY): October 2023
- Columbia University (New York, NY): October 2023
Accountable authentication with privacy protection: The Larch system for universal login
- Google (New York, NY): October 2023
- Brown University (Providence, RI): October 2023
- Stanford Security Seminar (Palo Alto, CA): July 2023
- OSDI (Boston, MA): July 2023 [slides]
- MIT (Cambridge, MA): July 2023
Reflections on Trusting Distributed Trust
Waldo: A Private Time-Series Database from Function Secret Sharing
- CRYPTO PPML workshop (Santa Barbara, CA): August 2023
- Soroco (virtual): October 2022
- CMU Applied Crypto Seminar (Pittsburgh, PA): September 2022
- Stanford Security Lunch (Palo Alto, CA): July 2022
- Sky Computing Retreat (Tahoe, NV): May 2022
- IEEE Security & Privacy (San Francisco, CA): May 2022 [video, slides]
- ETH Zurich Applied Crypto Seminar (virtual): March 2022
Snoopy: Surpassing the Scalability Bottleneck of Oblivious Storage
- MIT (Cambridge, MA): April 2022
- Stanford Security Lunch (Palo Alto, CA): November 2021
- SOSP (virtual): October 2021 [short video, long video, slides]
- CMU CyLab Seminar (virtual): October 2021 [slides]
- Cornell Security Seminar (virtual): October 2021
DORY: An Encrypted Search System with Distributed Trust
- Microsoft Research (virtual): August 2021
- CMU Applied Crypto Seminar (virtual): May 2021
- MIT Security Seminar (virtual): April 2021
- Stanford Security Lunch (virtual): April 2021
- University of Michigan (virtual): April 2021
- RISELab Winter Retreat (virtual): January 2021
- OSDI (virtual): November 2020 [slides, video]
SafetyPin: Encrypted Backups with Human-Memorable Secrets
True2F: Backdoor-resistant authentication tokens
- Cloudflare (San Francisco, CA): October 2019 [slides, video]
- Secure Internet of Things Project Retreat (Santa Cruz, CA): June 2019 [slides]
- Dropbox (San Francisco, CA): June 2019
- IEEE Security & Privacy (San Francisco, CA): May 2019 [slides, video]
- Duo (Ann Arbor, MI): April 2019 [slides, video]
- Stanford Computer Forum Security Workshop (Palo Alto, CA): April 2019 [slides, video]
- Real World Crypto (San Jose, CA): January 2019 [slides, video]
- FIDO Alliance Member Plenary (Austin, TX): January 2019 [slides]
- Google (Sunnyvale, CA): November 2018
- Stanford Security Lunch (Stanford, CA): October 2018
Teaching
Stanford
- CS 350S: Privacy-Preserving Systems (Fall 2026)
- CS 155: Computer and Network Security (Spring 2026)
- CS 350S: Privacy-Preserving Systems (Fall 2025)
UC Berkeley (Graduate)
- CS 294-163: Building Systems with Decentralized Trust (Berkeley) – Co-Instructor (Fall 2022)
- CS 194-200: How to Do Research and Social Impact Projects in Teams (Berkeley) – Graduate Student Instructor (Spring 2022)
Stanford (Undergraduate)
- CS 140: Operating Systems (Stanford) – Course Assistant (Winter 2019)
- CS 110: Principles of Computer Systems (Stanford) – Course Assistant (Fall 2018)
- CS 106A: Programming Methodology (Stanford) – Section Leader (Fall 2015, Winter 2016)
Service
Program committees
- Real World Crypto 2027
- HotOS 2027
- IEEE Security & Privacy 2027
- IEEE Security & Privacy 2026
- SOSP Doctoral Workshop 2024
- SOSP Student Research Competition 2024
- CATS 2023 (CCS workshop)
I was an organizer for the Berkeley DARE program and ran the Berkeley security seminar.
Awards
- Google ML and Systems Junior Faculty Award
- ACM SIGSAC Doctoral Dissertation Award Runner-Up
- Selected for EECS Rising Stars workshop
- Microsoft Ada Lovelace Research Fellowship
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
- Berkeley EECS Excellence Award
- First Place, CSAW US-Canada Applied Research Competition
- Stanford Phi Beta Kappa
- Stanford Tau Beta Pi