My Research Inclination

Aniket Kate

My research interests lie at the intersection of applied cryptography, distributed systems, and privacy. I design, implement, and analyze privacy-preserving, and accountability-enhancing (distributed) systems.

Despite the extensive development of cryptography over the last four decades, only a small fraction of it is being used in practice. Practitioners and systems researchers tend to rely on basic encryption and signature schemes and make assumptions about security that are not always sound in theory or practice. Unfortunately, many elaborate cryptographic protocols are not designed with careful consideration of real-world systems issues and threats, and these issues remain largely unaddressed in the cryptography research community.

My work aims to fill this gap by producing mathematically and theoretically elegant cryptographic results that are also useful in real-world scenarios. I pay careful attention to the usefulness of my work in practical applications, with the goal of realizing better authentication, privacy, and robustness guarantees for the ever-growing Internet-based systems. To achieve this, I focus on developing advanced yet practical cryptographic tools and distributed systems.

Currently, my projects focus on developing cryptographic systems for privacy and decentralized trust in three key contexts: (i) blockchains and cryptocurrencies, (ii) anonymous communication networks, and (iii) privacy-preserving and distributed learning and inference. Through these projects, I aim to contribute to the development of more secure, privacy-preserving, and trustworthy systems for the benefit of individuals, organizations, and society as a whole.