Aarushi Goel

Research Abstract:

The advent of digital age has resulted in the ever-expanding digitization of personal and organizational data and increased reliance on interconnected systems. This rapid growth has opened up numerous avenues for potential attacks, underscoring the importance of robust cryptographic techniques to safeguard sensitive information, critical infrastructure, and digital systems from malicious actors. Significant research efforts in the academic world, have succeeded in bringing cryptographic techniques relatively closer to practice. However, despite recent advances, integrating cryptographic techniques into existing systems incurs substantial computational overheads --- effectively gate-keeping users and applications that could benefit from cryptographic advancements. In light of this, the question arises as to whether it is feasible entrust cryptographic tasks to third-party entities such as cloud computing platforms, that are capable of efficiently performing heavy-duty computations. My work focuses on devising scalable and usable solutions that facilitate the outsourcing of cryptographic tasks at reasonable costs, while upholding the security, privacy and integrity of these operations. By offering cryptography-as-a-service, my work aims to streamline the integration of strong security measures by making the process more efficient and reducing the computational overheads on individuals. Additionally, this approach incentivizes third-party entities to provide such services in exchange for monetary benefits.

Bio:

Aarushi Goel is a postdoctoral researcher in the CIS Lab at NTT Research, mentored by Prof. Sanjam Garg. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2022, where she was advised by Prof. Abhishek Jain. Prior to that, she received her Bachelor's in Computer Science and Engineering in 2016 from IIIT-Delhi. Her research interests are in cryptography and in related areas of security and theoretical computer science.