Featured topics: Timelock Encryption, Witness Encryption, Deniable Encryption, Functional Encryption.
Structure: Welcome/introduction; two invited talks; break; two invited talks; mini-break; panel conversation.
Date and time: January 16th, 2025, 12:00–17:00 EST (UTC -5). (Subject to modifications)
Location: Virtual event (video conference).
Attendance: Open and free to the public, upon registration.
Format: Webinar (presenters can share video and audio; attendees can use text for questions and comments).
Schedule in EST = UTC-5 (subject to updates):
(EST = Eastern Standard Time; UTC = Coordinated Universal Time)
Abbreviated bios:
(Based on text provided by the speakers/panelists, with possible adaptations/abbreviations for conciseness and consistency; see possible links for extended bios)
- Sanjam Garg is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests are in cryptography and its applications to security and privacy. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2013 and his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 2008. Prof. Garg is the recipient of various honors such as the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, the Sloan Research Fellowship and the IIT Delhi Graduates of the Last Decade Award. Prof. Garg's research has been recognized with a test of time award at FOCS 2023, and best paper awards at EUROCRYPT 2013, CRYPTO 2017 and EUROCRYPT 2018.
- Kelsey Melissaris is a postdoctoral researcher in Aarhus University’s Cryptography and Security Group. Her postdoctoral research is focused on digital signatures and threshold cryptography. Kelsey received her Ph.D. from the City University of New York in 2022 and wrote her thesis on authenticated key exchange.
- Rafail Ostrovsky is the Chair in Knowledge Sciences at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. He is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at UCLA, and is serving on the editorial boards of Journal of ACM, Algorithmica Journal, and Journal of Cryptology. He is a Fellow of the NAI, AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and IACR, and foreign member of Academia Europaea. He has 350+ refereed publications and 15 issued USPTO patents. He chaired the IEEE TC on Mathematical Foundations of Computing (2015–2018), chaired the FOCS 2011 PC, and served on 40+ international conference PC's. He earned multiple honors, including the Henry Taub Prize (1993), the RSA prize (2018), and two distinguished awards from IEEE Computer Society (2017, 2022).
- Yolan Romailler is an applied cryptographer at Randamu delving into (and dwelling on) cryptography, secure coding, and other fun things. He has previously spoken at Black Hat USA, Real World Crypto and DEF CON on topics including automation in cryptography research, functional encryption, distributed randomness, and more! He notably introduced the first practical fault attack against the EdDSA signature scheme. Nowadays he's working on threshold cryptography, including Verifiable Random Functions (VRFs), Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs), distributed key generation, and timelock encryption.
- Amit Sahai is a Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at UCLA, and Advisor to the Prison Mathematics Project. His research interests include cryptography, coding theory, complexity theory, and security. He is the recipient of numerous honors, including the 2022 National Academy of Sciences Held Prize. He is a Simons Investigator (2021), Fellow of the ACM (2018), Fellow of the IACR (2019), and Fellow of the AMS (2024).
About STPPA: In the "Special Topics on Privacy and Public Auditability" series, the NIST privacy-enhancing cryptography (PEC) project hosts talks on various interconnected topics related to privacy and public auditability. A main goal of the STPPA series is to gather reference material about "PEC tools", which may facilitate future reflections on aspects of standardization and of development of recommendations/guidelines about advanced cryptography, namely for uses related to privacy and public auditability. Each event intends to convey basic technical background, incite curiosity, suggest research questions and discuss applications, with an emphasis on the role of cryptographic tools.
Code of conduct: Attending an STPPA event requires abiding to the Code of Conduct for NIST Conferences.
