Marshall Ball

About

Marshall Ball is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at NYU Courant, with research focused on theoretical computer science, particularly the foundations of cryptography and computational complexity. He completed his PhD at Columbia University under the advisement of Tal Malkin and spent two and a half years visiting the FACT Center at IDC Herzliya, Israel during his doctoral studies. Following his graduation, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington supported by an NSF/CRA Computing Innovation Fellowship, working under the guidance of Huijia Lin and Stefano Tessaro. His research contributions include exploring topology-hiding computation, cryptography from information loss, non-malleable codes, and the complexity of various cryptographic primitives. He has been involved in developing new techniques for zero-knowledge proofs, studying the boundaries of topology-hiding computation, and investigating the hardness of cryptographic problems. Marshall Ball is actively engaged in teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses related to cryptography and algorithms, and he serves on program committees for major conferences in cryptography and theoretical computer science.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Mathematics
• Algorithm
• Computer Security
• Discrete mathematics
• Electronic engineering
• Engineering
• Mathematical analysis
• Pure mathematics
• Optoelectronics

Selected publications

• Experimental evaluation of digitally verifiable photonic computing for blockchain and cryptocurrency

  Optica · 2023 · 28 citations

  As blockchain technology and cryptocurrency become increasingly mainstream, photonic computing has emerged as an efficient hardware platform that reduces ever-increasing energy costs required to verify transactions in decentralized cryptonetworks. To reduce sensitivity of these verifications to photonic hardware error, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a cryptographic scheme, LightHash, that implements robust, low-bit precision matrix multiplication in programmable silicon photonic netwo…

  PublisherDOI

• New Ways to Garble Arithmetic Circuits

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2023-01-01 · 12 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Kolmogorov Comes to Cryptomania: On Interactive Kolmogorov Complexity and Key-Agreement

  2023-11-06 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Only a handful candidates for computational assumptions that imply secure key-agreement protocols (KA) are known, and even fewer are believed to be quantum safe. In this paper, we present a new hardness assumption-the worst-case hardness of a promise problem related to an interactive version of Kolmogorov Complexity. Roughly speaking, the promise problem requires telling apart tuples of strings $(\pi, x, y)$ with relatively (w.r.t. $\mathrm{K}(\pi)$) low time-bounded Interactive Kolmogorov Compl…

  PublisherDOI

• (Nondeterministic) Hardness vs. Non-malleability

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2022-01-01 · 7 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Experimental evaluation of digitally-verifiable photonic computing for blockchain and cryptocurrency

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2022-05-17 · 5 citations

  preprintOpen access

  As blockchain technology and cryptocurrency become increasingly mainstream, ever-increasing energy costs required to maintain the computational power running these decentralized platforms create a market for more energy-efficient hardware. Photonic cryptographic hash functions, which use photonic integrated circuits to accelerate computation, promise energy efficiency for verifying transactions and mining in a cryptonetwork. Like many analog computing approaches, however, current proposals for p…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Tal Malkin

  32 shared

• Dana Dachman-Soled

  17 shared

• Elette Boyle

  Herzliya Medical Center

  12 shared

• Tal Moran

  10 shared

• Mukul Kulkarni

  9 shared

• Prashant Nalini Vasudevan

  9 shared

• Alon Rosen

  9 shared

• Pierre Meyer

  Aarhus University

  7 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science

  Columbia University

• Other

  FACT Center at IDC Herzliya

• Other

  University of Washington

Awards & honors

• NSF/CRA Computing Innovation Fellowship

Similar researchers at New York University

• Martin Farach-Coltonh-55
• Joseph Bonneauh-41
• Nir Bitanskyh-29