Hi, I’m Palak! I study the real world implications of the various ways privacy and security are defined and guaranteed today.
ABOUT ME
I’m a Ph.D. candidate in Theoretical Computer Science at Boston University. My research uses the lenses of cryptography and differential privacy to design privacy-respecting systems and understand the downstream effects of those technologies on the individuals they intend to protect.
Since I primarily address sociotechnical problems, my research endeavours are often interdisciplinary; for example, my colleagues and I have been awarded a grant from the Boston University Center for Anti-Racist Research to study the downstream effects of differential privacy in the census on marginalised communities.
Office: CDS 1039
Email: palakj “at” bu.edu
RECENT HIGHLIGHTS
Apr ’23
I presented my work that models the security of the Signal Architecture at the Stanford Security Lunch.
Our goal with the composable model for end-to-end secure messaging is not only to provide an idealised security guaranty that enables the analysis of the Signal protocol but also to enable the analysis of protocols that use Signal (or any protocol that realises our functionality) by defining an ideal module is readily usable as a component within other protocols in security-preserving manner.
Thank you to everyone who attended and engaged with my presentation! It was a great experience.
Mar ’23
I passed my qualifying exam!
I’m grateful for all the support and guidance from my qual exam committee members, Adam Smith, Ran Canetti, and Mayank Varia. Also, I’d like to extend a special thanks to all the students and faculty who attended my talk — seeing a room filled with encouraging smiles truly made a difference.
Feb ’23
I had the wonderful opportunity to be a mentor at Tech for Change‘s Civic Tech Hackathon .
The student groups had thought-provoking ideas and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting other mentors with similar interests and widely varying expertise!
PUBLICATIONS
2022
ICML ’23
The Price of Differential Privacy under Continual Observation
[paper link][talk link]
Palak Jain, Sofya Raskhodnikova, Satchit Sivakumar, Adam Smith.
CRYPTO ’22
Universally Composable End-to-End Secure Messaging
[paper link][talk link]
Ran Canetti, Palak Jain, Marika Swanberg, Mayank Varia.
TALKS
2022
Nov ’22
Lightning talk at the 2nd ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law. [talk link]
The talk is on joint work with Ero Balsa and Helen Nissenbaum at Cornell Tech.
Aug ’22
CRYPTO 2022 talk on my paper “Universally Composable End-to-End Secure Messaging” [paper link][talk link]
Jul ’22
TPDP 2022 invited talk on my paper ‘The Price of Differential Privacy under Continual Observation‘ . [paper link][talk link]
Joint with my good friend Satchit Sivakumar.
Palak Jain 