Pratyush Ranjan Tiwari

Biography

I am a first year PhD student at Johns Hopkins University under the wonderful supervision of both Abhishek Jain and Matt Green. I am in general interested in cryptography and its applications, more specifically, most of my research interests are at the intersection of cryptography with privacy, ML and quantum computation. I am particularly interested in designing protocols with minimal trust requirements.

Interests

Privacy-preserving computation
Cryptography in a Quantum world
ML Security & Privacy

Education

PhD in Computer Science, 2025
Johns Hopkins University
Ashoka Scholar's Program (1 year Postgrad by research), 2020
Ashoka University
BSc in Mathematics & Computer Science, 2019
Ashoka University

Experience

PhD student

Johns Hopkins University

Sep 2020 – Present Maryland, USA

My advisors are Abhishek Jain and Matt Green. Work on Verifiable computation, Post-Quantum cryptography.

Research Assistant

New York University, Abu Dhabi

Jun 2020 – Aug 2020 Virtual

Working on privacy-preserving techniques under Prof. Christina Pöpper at the Cyber Security & Privacy Lab (CSP-lab).

Teaching Assistant

Ashoka University

Aug 2019 – May 2020 India

TA for Prof. Debayan Gupta: (1) Spring 2020: Computer Security & Privacy (2) Fall 2019: A New Geography in the Information Age

Cryptography Engineering Intern

Celo

May 2019 – Aug 2019 Germany

Worked on Celo’s Ultralight Client Sync which enables users to download very small number of block headers to verify correctness of current validator set. On the implementation team for Pedersen Hashes, different elliptic curves and bls-zexe in Rust and Sage similar to the ZCash Protocol

Summer Research Intern

IIT Madras

Jul 2018 – Jun 2019 India

Cryptanalysis of Stream Ciphers like Grain 128 and Trivium under Prof. Santanu Sarkar. Worked alongside PhD students to implement 855-round key recovery attack on Trivium. Implementations in C and Sage.

Accomplishments

Undergraduate Research Excellence Award

Computer Science department, Ashoka University Jul 2020

Awarded to the graduating student with the best track record in academic research, evaluated on the basis of publications and thesis quality.

Engineering Fellow: Privacy Preserving Eigenvalue Computation

Celo Nov 2018 – Feb 2019

Celo’s algorithmically volume regulated stablecoin protocol requires each user to calculate their own Eigentrust score. Developing an efficient Zero Knowledge protocol to enable this. Youngest fellow among all the Celo fellows. Usually fellows are advanced Graduate students. Received a $10,000 grant.