Abstract

My research interests lie at the intersection of cryptographic research, and systems security and privacy research. With the rise of personal computers and the Internet in the last three decades, cryptography has received a tremen-dous amount of attention, which has led to its rapid and extensive development. It is now considered a full-fledged academic subject rather than an applied field in algebra and complexity theory. However, only a small fraction of this extensive cryptographic research is being used in practice. Practitioners and systems researchers prefer to build their systems using the basic encryption and signature schemes, and generally reliable but theoretically unsound security assumptions as most existing elaborate cryptographic protocols are not designed with careful consideration of real-world systems issues and threats. With few exceptions, these systems issues have remained largely unaddressed in the cryptography research community. My work aims at bridging this gap between cryptographic research, and system security (and privacy) research: Along with producing theoretically elegant cryptographic results, I endeavor to make them useful in real-world sce-narios. In the long run, I wish to resolve real-world security, privacy, and robustness issues with ever-growing Internet-based systems by developing advanced-yet-practical cryptographic tools. My current projects focus on developing cryptographic systems for privacy and decentralized trust. During my PhD at Waterloo and my postdoc at MPI-SWS, I concentrated mainly on bridging the gap between theoretical and