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Aniket Kate

Associate Professor (on research leave)
University Faculty Scholar


Department of Computer Science
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN, USA

Email: my-first-name@purdue.edu
[How To Pronounce My Name]


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Brief Bio

Prof. Aniket Kate is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and a University Faculty Scholar at Purdue University. He is also the Chief Research Officer at Supra. He is an applied cryptographer and a privacy researcher. His research builds on and expands applied cryptography, distributed computing, and game theory to solve security/privacy problems in decentralized environments. His current projects focus on distributed ledgers (or blockchains) and secure computations. He is a recipient of the 2019 NSF CAREER Award.

Before joining Purdue in 2015, he was a junior faculty member at Saarland University, Germany. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) in Germany. He received his PhD from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and his masters from IIT-Bombay, India.

While he is currently on a research leave to work at Supra, he maintains a research group at Purdue and is actively looking for PhD students and a post-doc.


For more about his research (inclination)...

Research Thrusts

  • Cryptocurrencies & Blockchains [NDSS '24 '23 '19-'17 '15] [CCS '23 '17 '15] [FC '22-'20] [Usenix Sec '21] [PETS '20 '17 '16] [WWW '18] [ESORICS '14]
    • analyzing and improving privacy and security of cryptocurrencies, layer-2 solutions, IOU credit networks (e.g., Ripple), and consortium blockchain solutions (e.g., Hyperledger)
    • developing cryptography-aided (smart) contracts for breaking theoretical barriers
    • designing novel distributed ledger (or blockchain) architectures for supply-chains and distributed CPS

  • MPC & Threshold Crypto [CCS '24 '23 '20 '19] [NDSS '23 '22 '20] [EuroS&P'23] [AFT '22] [PETS '22] [GPCE'21] [PODC '14 '12] [ACSAC '14] [CT-RSA '13] [ASIACRYPT '11 '10] [SCN '10] [ICDCS '09]
    • improving the robustness and efficiency of multi-party computation (MPC)
    • developing MPC-based solutions for blockchains, verifiable randomness, differential privacy, #metoo, & machine learning
    • designing synchronous/asynchronous protocols for VSS and DKG

  • Consensus & DHTs [CCS '24'21] [DSN '24] [FC '23] [Middleware '23] [ICDCS '23 '10][EuroSys '14] [ToN '13] [PODC '12] [ASIACCS '12]
    • designing synchronous/asynchronous protocols for state machine replication and reliable broadcast/ data dissemination
    • building tailored consensus protocols for data-centers, distributed CPS, oracles, and random beacons
    • designing scalable, robust, and private protocols for secure DHT lookups

  • Anonymity Networks [S&P '24 '18] [ISIT '24] [CSF '24 '13 '12] [PETS '23 '22 '20 '07] [NDSS '17] [ACNS '17 '15 '14] [ESORICS '16] [CCS '14] [WPES '12] [TISSec '10] [FC '10]
    • understanding the fundamental communication lower bounds for anonymous communications
    • developing cryptographic and distributing computing primitives to enhance privacy, scalability, and accountability of anonymous communication and anonymous storage networks
    • building frameworks for defining, analyzing, and quantifying anonymity properties for the networks

Dormant (but ready to be revived)

  • Right to be Forgotten/Update/Repair [Usenix Sec '22][NDSS' 21][ FC'21][PETS' 19] [IC '17] [SOUPS' 16]
  • Privacy-Preserving Web Analytics [ACSAC '14] [S&P '12]
  • Accountability and Transparency [TDSC '16] [COSN '15]

Selected Recent Publications


For the complete publication list, local copies, and preprints: [Publication Page] [Google Scholar]

[IEEE S&P '24] More is Merrier: Relax the Non-Collusion Assumption in Multi-Server PIR

[IEEE S&P '24] Attacking and Improving the Tor Directory Protocol

[CCS'23] Uncovering Impact of Mental Models towards Adoption of Multi-device Crypto-Wallets

[NDSS'23] OptRand: Optimistically Responsive Reconfigurable Distributed Randomness

[Usenix SEC'22] Empirical Understanding of Deletion Privacy: Experiences, Expectations, and Measures

[CCS'21] RandPiper - Reconfiguration-Friendly Random Beacons with Quadratic Communication

[Usenix SEC'21] Blitz: Secure Multi-Hop Payments Without Two-Phase Commits

[CCS'20] Verifiable Timed Signatures Made Practical

[NDSS'20] Finding Safety in Numbers with Secure Allegation Escrows

[CCS'19] HoneyBadgerMPC and AsynchroMix: Practical Asynchronous MPC and its Application to Anonymous Communication

[NDSS'19] Anonymous Multi-Hop Locks for Blockchain Scalability and Interoperability

[IEEE S&P '18] Anonymity Trilemma: Strong Anonymity, Low Bandwidth, Low Latency---Choose Two

[WWW'18] Mind Your Credit: Assessing the Health of the Ripple Credit Network

[NDSS'18] Settling Payments Fast and Private: Efficient Decentralized Routing for Path-Based Transactions

[CCS'17] Concurrency and Privacy with Payment-Channel Networks

[IEEE S&P '17] SymCerts: Practical Symbolic Execution For Exposing Noncompliance in X.509 Certificate Validation Implementations

[NDSS'17] P2P Mixing and Unlinkable Bitcoin Transactions

[NDSS'17] SilentWhispers: Enforcing Security and Privacy in Decentralized Credit Networks

[JPC'16] AnoA: A Framework for Analyzing Anonymous Communication Protocols

[COSN'15] Strength in Numbers: Robust Tamper Detection in Crowd Computations ***Best Paper Award***

[CCS'15] Liar, Liar, Coins on Fire! -- Penalizing Equivocation By Loss of Bitcoins


Service

  • Organization
    [DCN 2023] Organizer for the Workshop on Decentralized Credit Networks (DCN)
    [CSF 2022] Track Chair on Blockchain
    [RWdC 2021] Organizer for the Real-World Decentralized Cryptography Workshop
    [CSF 2019] Track Chair on Blockchain
    [CNS 2019] Technical Program Area Chair
    [CCS 2018] Proceedings Chair
    [CCS 2016] Poster/Demo Chair

  • Selected Program Committee
    2024[IEEE S&P], [FC]
    2023[IEEE S&P], [FC]
    2022[CCS], [ICDCS], [AFT], [FC]
    2021[CCS], [Usenix Security], [IEEE S&P], [WWW], [FC], [AFT], [ASIACCS]
    2020[IEEE S&P], [Usenix Security], [FC], [WPES]
    2019[IEEE S&P], [CCS], [NDSS], [WWW], [FC]
    2018[CCS], [Usenix Security], [NDSS], [ICDCS], [ACNS], [Bitcoin]
    2017[CCS], [CSF], [ACNS], [WPES], [Bitcoin], [ICDCS]
    2016 [Eurocrypt], [ACNS], [FC], [Bitcoin], [ICDCS]
    2015 [CCSW], [WPES], [ICDCS], [ProvSec]
    ...

  • Editorial Board
    2021-22IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
    2018-19Privacy Enhancing Technologies

  • Overall Coordinator at SecNet 2006, Annual Network Security Workshop, IIT-Bombay, India, 2006.

Teaching

(CS 528: Network Security) [Spring'22] [Spring'21] [Spring'19] [Spring'18] [Spring'17] [Spring'16]
(CS 426: Computer Security) [Fal'20] [Fall'19] [Fall'17] [Fall'16]
(CS 590: Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies) [Spring'20] [Spring'19]
(CS 690: Privacy Enhancing Technologies) [Fall'15]

@Saarland University

(Advanced Course) Privacy Enhancing Technologies [Summer'13] [Spring'14] [Spring'15]
(Advanced Course) Applied Cryptography [Winter'14/'15]
(Seminar Course) Practical Cryptographic Systems [Spring'14] [Winter'12/'13]

Miscellaneous


Contact Information

305 N. University Street
(Department of Computer Science)
West Lafayette, IN 47907-2107
USA


Phone: +1-765-496-2763 (Email is preferred in general.)
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