News

Our paper, Nenya: Efficient zkSNARKs for Z/2^kZ Integer Rings via Reverse Multiplication-Friendly Embeddings, led by Tianyu Zhang and coauthored by Yupeng Zhang and myself, was accepted at IEEE S&P 2027. See you in Montreal!

I will be visiting Georgetown University on September 18, 2026, and delivering a CS colloquium talk, "Proofs of Authorization: Flexible and Upgradeable Access Control with a Reduced Trust Envelope", based on our USENIX Security Prezta work

Aarushi's paper, Optimizing Very Large Integer Multiplication Using GPUs, reporting on her senior thesis work, was accepted at the IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference!

Our paper, Prezta: Provable Remote Execution of Zero-Trust Authorization using SNARKs, was accepted to the 2026 USENIX Security Symposium. This was joint work with Zhongjing Wei, Osaid Muhammad Ameer, and Yupeng Zhang. See you in Baltimore!

This year I had the honor to supervise three senior theses: Aarushi Aggrwal, working on accelerating large integer multiplication with GPUs, Cygnus Qiu, working on grammar-aware fuzzing, and Vaibhav Mattoo, working on using game theory for robust routing for anonymous communication. Aarushi will be joining NVIDIA after graduation, Cygnus will be going on to do his Master's at Georgia Tech, and Vaibhav will be staying at illinois for his masters.

Submission deadlines are on June 11 and November 17, 2026, with abstract registration a week earlier

After twenty years of teaching in ECE, I’m looking forward to helping strengthen our undergraduate programs and navigate a rapidly changing educational landscape. I expect there will be some cat herding involved, so I’ve already put in a request for a lint brush.

I was very lucky to work with Parisa as my first graduate student (MS 2007). She is now Vice President of Google Chrome. Her award is for her contributions to computer security, driving collaboration across societal sectors, and increasing diversity in tech

Submission deadlines are on June 5 and November 13, 2025

This semester we will be reading papers from top security conferences published in the last few years

New project on using Zero-knowledge Proofs for access control in operational technology (OT) networks in energy systems funded as part of CITES. This project is in collaboration with Prof. Yupeng Zhang

I will be reviewing papers for the Privacy and Anonymity track. Submission deadlines are on January 9 and April 14, 2025

Prateek was an early graduate student of mine (PhD 2012); he was a delight to work with and it has been an even greater pleasure to see him grow into a leader in the field. He is currently a Professor at Princeton University; his award celebrates his fundamental contributions to privacy and security and creating societal impact