Rashmi Agrawal

Research Abstract:

Data breaches using increasingly sophisticated techniques have become very common these days. In the past five years, there have been more than 7000 data breaches involving the theft of the personal information of billions of people. In the year 2022 alone, the global average cost per data breach was $4.35 million, and this number is expected to grow in 2023. Over the years, various data encryption schemes including RSA, ECC, and AES have been used to enable data security and privacy. However, these schemes are deemed vulnerable to quantum computers. As quantum computers are expected to become mainstream in the near future, post-quantum secure encryption schemes are required. To this end, through NIST’s post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standardization efforts, code-based crypto (CBC) and lattice-based crypto (LBC) have emerged as plausible ways forward. Both CBC and LBC schemes enable public key cryptosystems (PKC), key exchange mechanisms, and digital signatures. Moreover, LBC schemes support fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) that enables computation on encrypted data. In my dissertation research, I co-optimized the PQC and FHE algorithms, and hardware to design practical data security and privacy solutions for the post-quantum era.

Bio:

Rashmi Agrawal works as a Research Scientist at the Security and Privacy Research (SPR) group at Intel Labs. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Boston University. She graduated in January 2023 and was advised by Prof. Ajay Joshi at Integrated Circuits and Systems Group (ICSG), Boston University. During her Ph.D., she led the research thrust on designing efficient architectures and co-processors for post-quantum cryptographic schemes and fully homomorphic encryption. This is to enable data security and privacy both now and in the post-quantum era. She also continues to collaborate with Ajay to continue the research to enable fully homomorphic encryption for real-world applications. She holds an MS degree from Boston University and a Bachelors degree in Computer Engineering from Saurashtra University, India.