I am a postdoc at MIT in computer science with Henry Corrigan-Gibbs. I am broadly interested in building secure systems using cryptography.

I completed my Ph.D. in computer science at UC Berkeley where I was advised by Raluca Ada Popa and Ion Stoica. Before that, I finished my B.S. and M.S. in computer science at Stanford University where I was advised by David Mazières.

I will be starting as an assistant professor at Stanford in fall 2025.

Research interests:

• Protecting user accounts from compromised single sign-on providers (Larch, OSDI'23), backup providers (SVR3, OSDI'24 and SafetyPin, OSDI'20), and authentication tokens (True2F, IEEE S&P'19).
• Building private web infrastructure, including private web search (Tiptoe, SOSP'23) and private web browsing (Lightweb, HotNets'23).
• Supporting queries on encrypted data with strong privacy for keyword search (Dory, OSDI'20), timeseries analytics queries (Waldo, IEEE S&P'22), and horizontally scalable key-value stores (Snoopy, SOSP'21).

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.

LegoLog: A Configurable Transparency Log
    Vivian Fang, Emma Dauterman, Akshay Ravoor, Akshit Dewan, and Raluca Ada Popa
    EuroS&P 2025 (to appear)

Secure Systems from Insecure Components
    Emma Dauterman
    PhD Thesis [thesis]

Secret Key Recovery in a Global-Scale End-to-End Encryption System
    Graeme Connell*, Vivian Fang*, Rolfe Schmidt*, Emma Dauterman, and Raluca Ada Popa
    OSDI 2024 [full version] [code] [artifact eval]

Lightweb: Private web browsing without all the baggage [paper]
    Emma Dauterman and Henry Corrigan-Gibbs
    HotNets 2023

Private web search with Tiptoe [full version] [system code, crypto code] [blog post]
    Alexandra Henzinger, Emma Dauterman, Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, and Nickolai Zeldovich
    SOSP 2023

Accountable authentication with privacy protection: The Larch system for universal login [full version] [code]
    Emma Dauterman, Danny Lin, Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, and David Mazières
    OSDI 2023

Reflections on Trusting Distributed Trust [paper]
    Emma Dauterman*, Vivian Fang*, Natacha Crooks, and Raluca Ada Popa
    HotNets 2022

Waldo: A Private Time-Series Database from Function Secret Sharing [full version] [code]
    Emma Dauterman, Mayank Rathee, Raluca Ada Popa, and Ion Stoica
    IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2022

Snoopy: Surpassing the Scalability Bottleneck of Oblivious Storage [conference proceedings] [full version] [code]
    Emma Dauterman*, Vivian Fang*, Ioannis Demertzis, Natacha Crooks, and Raluca Ada Popa
    SOSP 2021

DORY: An Encrypted Search System with Distributed Trust [conference proceedings] [full version] [code]
    Emma Dauterman, Eric Feng, Ellen Luo, Raluca Ada Popa, and Ion Stoica
    OSDI 2020

SafetyPin: Encrypted Backups with Human-Memorable Secrets [conference proceedings] [full version] [code]
    Emma Dauterman, Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, and David Mazières
    OSDI 2020

True2F: Backdoor-resistant authentication tokens [paper] [reference code] [host code]
    Emma Dauterman, Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, David Mazières, Dan Boneh, and Dominic Rizzo
    IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2019
    First Place, CSAW US-Canada Applied Research Competition

Preprints

Reducing Participation Costs via Incremental Verification for Ledger Systems [paper] [IVLS implementation] [PCD implementation] [non-native field constraints] [constraints for Marlin] [constraints for Marlin's polynomial commitments]
    Weikeng Chen*, Alessandro Chiesa*, Emma Dauterman*, and Nicholas P. Ward*

* denotes equal first-authors

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
    Intel (virtual): May 2023
    HotNets (Austin, TX): November 2022 [slides, video]

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 S&P (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
    Facebook (virtual): March 2021 [slides]
    Google (virtual): February 2021 [slides]
    OSDI (virtual): November 2020 [slides, video]
    Stanford Security Lunch (Stanford, CA): June 2020

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 S&P (Oakland) (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

Graduate (UC Berkeley):
    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)

Undergraduate (Stanford)
    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)

Fellowships and awards:
    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

PC committees:
    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.

Advice:

• Applying to grad schools
• One (of many) excellent blog posts on grad school.

Photo by Paul Gargagliano. Website style adapted from Wenting Zheng.