Aanchal Malhotra

I am a PhD student at Boston University advised by Prof. Sharon Goldberg. My research interests are network security and cryptography. I use tools from cryptography and the insights gained from network measurement and simulations to improve security and reliability of the core Internet protocols like NTP, DNS, TLS, BGP, etc.

I received MS in computer science with a specialization in cyber security in January, 2015 from Boston University. I was co-advised by Profs. Sharon Goldberg and Leonid Reyzin.

Prior to joining Boston University, I was a research intern at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras working in provable security advised by Prof. Chandrasekaran Pandu Rangan.

I was a Cryptography engineer at Cloudflare's cryptography team from January-April, 2019. My role was to lead the team to design a new more robust internal NTP architecture and (D)DoS prevention ecosystem to offer time service to external clients and implement secure NTP server-Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) based cryptographically secure Network Time Security (NTS) proposal at IETF.

For more details refer to my blog post on Introducing time.cloudflare.com and this news article.

I was a research fellow at Nlnet labs, Amsterdam, the Netherlands from July-Sept, 2017. I analyzed the impact of security vulnerabilities in network time on other protocols such as DNS and DNSSec. We have implemented our recommendations as part of the popular Unbound open source caching DNS resolver. The project is funded by SIDN Fonds, Netherlands.

I was a research intern at the Information Security group at Akamai Technologies, Cambridge. My work here involved "Security Evaluation of Akamai's NTP infrastructure" with Brian Sniffen and Daniel Franke.

I was a visiting research fellow at Cisco Systems, Knoxville working on a short-term project titled: "Tactical Evaluation of the Network Time Protocol" for the month of September, 2015.

I participated in the Hebrew University Networking Summer at Hebrew University, Israel from June 1- June 20, 2015.

You can find my CV here.

Academic Publications

The Impact of Time on DNS Security.

Aanchal Malhotra, Willem Toorop, Benno Overreinder, Ralph Dolmons, Sharon Goldberg

Manuscript in Submission.

A Universally Composable Treatment of Network Time.

Ran Canetti, Kyle Hogan, Aanchal Malhotra, Mayank Varia

In the proceedings of Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF), 2017 IEEE 30th, 360-375.

The Security of NTP's Datagram Protocol.

Aanchal Malhotra, Matthew V. Gundy, Mayank Varia, Haydn Kennedy, Jonathan Gardner, Sharon Goldberg

In the proceedings of 21st International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC), Malta. 405-423, February 2017. news

Attacking NTP's Authenticated Broadcast Mode.

Aanchal Malhotra, Sharon Goldberg

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, April 2016 issue.

The associated CVEs are CVE-2015-7979 and (Deja-Vu Attack) CVE-2015-7973.

Attacking the Network Time Protocol.

Aanchal Malhotra, Isaac E. Cohen, Erik Brakke, Sharon Goldberg

In the proceedings of Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), San Diego, California. 21-24 February, 2016. paper project page news slides

The associated CVEs are CVE-2015-7704, CVE-2015-7705, and CVE-2015-5300.

Practical IBE Secure under CBDH - Encrypting Without Pairing.

S. Sree Vivek, S. Sharmila Deva Selvi, Aanchal Malhotra, C. Pandu Rangan

In the Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Security and Cryptography, 251-258, 2015, Colmar, Alsace, France.

RPKI vs ROVER: Comparing the Risks of BGP Security Solutions.

Aanchal Malhotra, Sharon Goldberg

Poster in the proceedings of ACM conference on SIGCOMM 2014 113-4. Full version

RFCs & IETF Drafts

Full List of Publications here

Invited Talks

  • Cornell University (November 2018)
  • Princeton University Security Seminar (November 2018)
  • CSAIL-MIT Security Seminar (November 2017)
  • University of Connecticut Security Seminar (November 2016)
  • New England Networking and Systems Day (NENS) (October 2016)
  • Northeastern University Security Seminar (May 2016)
  • Stony Brook University (April 2016)
  • CSAIL-MIT Security Seminar (March 2016)
  • Charles River Crypto Day- MIT (Oct 2015)

Contact Information

Aanchal Malhotra

Computer Science

111 Cummington Mall, MCS 135A

Boston, MA 02215.

Email: aanchal4 at bu dot edu

Phone: 857-234-6734