The excitement around privacy enhancing technologies powered by cryptographic techniques, including zero-knowledge proofs, secure multiparty computation, and differential privacy, continues to grow. This excitement has been memorialized by an increasing number of real-world deployments and many policy memos. My research makes cryptography ready for real-world deployment in three ways: (1) improving the performance of core cryptographic primitives, (2) exploring the applicability of cryptographic protocols to new problems, and (3) studying the social-technical contexts with which we deploy cryptography in order to improve the chances that a deployment will be successful. In pursuing these research directions, I draw on techniques that span theoretical cryptography, applied cryptography, and human-centered computing. In this talk I will give an example of recent or ongoing work in each of these threads and argue that each of them is critical to realizing the promise of privacy enhancing technologies.
Gabriel Kaptchuk is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science with a joint appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He is a core faculty member in the Maryland Cybersecurity Center.
Kaptchuk’s research centers on human-centered cryptography, aiming to revolutionize privacy-preserving systems. Departing from traditional, mathematically intensive approaches, he focuses on making cryptographic tools intuitive and accessible to users. Kaptchuk’s work spans core cryptography, developing faster algorithms for practical implementation, while also addressing policy implications and human-computer interaction.
Before coming to UMD, he was a research assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Boston University.
Kaptchuk is the recipient of a Computing Innovation Fellowship from NSF and the Computing Research Association.
He received his doctorate in computer science from Johns Hopkins University.