Mayank Varia

About

My research interests span theoretical and applied cryptography and its applications throughout and beyond computing & data sciences. In my research, I often design and develop crypto algorithms with provable, composable security guarantees, deploy privacy-respecting systems for data scientists to work with data they cannot see, and examine the social aspects of cryptography, including its impacts on law and public policy.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Theoretical computer science
• Computer network
• Information Retrieval
• Internet privacy
• Programming language
• Database
• Mathematics
• Distributed computing

Selected publications

• Universally Composable End-to-End Secure Messaging

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2022 · 27 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Balanced Byzantine Reliable Broadcast with Near-Optimal Communication and Improved Computation

  2022-07-20 · 26 citations

  articleOpen access

  This paper studies Byzantine reliable broadcast (BRB) under asynchronous networks, and improves the state-of-the-art protocols from the following aspects. Near-optimal communication cost: We propose two new BRB protocols for n nodes and input message M that has communication cost O(n|M|+n2 logn), which is nearoptimal due to the lower bound of Ω(n|M|+n2). The first RBC protocol assumes threshold signature but is easy to understand, while the second RBC protocol is error-free but less intuitive. I…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Privacy-Preserving Automated Exposure Notification.

  IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive · 2020 · 25 citations

  Contact tracing is an essential component of public health efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. Automating parts of the contact tracing process has the potential to significantly increase its scalability and efficacy, but also raises an array of privacy concerns, including the risk of unwanted identification of infected individuals and clandestine collection of privacy-invasive data about the population at large. In this paper, we focus on automating the exposure…

  Publisher

• Two-Server Distributed ORAM with Sublinear Computation and Constant Rounds

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2021 · 21 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Brief Announcement: Asynchronous Verifiable Information Dispersal with Near-Optimal Communication

  2022-07-20 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access

  We present a near-optimal asynchronous verifiable information dispersal (AVID) protocol. The total dispersal cost of our AVID protocol is O(|M| + κ n^2), and the retrieval cost per client is O(|M| + κ n). Unlike prior works, our AVID protocol only assumes the existence of collision-resistant hash functions. Also, in our AVID protocol, the dispersing client incurs a communication cost of O(|M|+κ n) in comparison to O(|M|+κ n łog n) of prior best. Moreover, each node in our AVID protocol incurs a…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• EAGER: SaTC: Early-Stage Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Multi-regulation computation

  NSF · $300k · 2019–2024

• InTrans: Modular Security on an Open Cloud

  NSF · $500k · 2019–2022

• CICI: RSARC: Trustworthy Computing over Protected Datasets

  NSF · $1.0M · 2017–2020

Frequent coauthors

• Matteo Maffei

  36 shared

• Deepak Garg

  Max Planck Institute for Software Systems

  36 shared

• Luca Viganò

  36 shared

• Limin Jia

  Carnegie Mellon University

  36 shared

• Ralf Küsters

  University of Stuttgart

  36 shared

• Ran Canetti

  20 shared

• Sarah Scheffler

  Carnegie Mellon University

  13 shared

• Andrei Lapets

  13 shared

Labs

• Faculty of Computing & Data SciencesPI

Education

• Ph.D., Mathematics

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

  2010

• B.S.

  Duke University

  2005

Awards & honors

• 2026: General chair of IACR CRYPTO 2026
• 2025: CS&Law Best Paper and SOSP Distinguished Artifact awar…
• 2024: Hosted Dan Roche as a visiting professor at BU
• 2023: Received CDS Distinguished Leadership Award and a Hari…
• 2022: Hosted Civic Voices event to discuss privacy tech with…

Similar researchers at Boston University

• Kate Saenkoh-89
• Stan Sclaroffh-69