Prashant Agrawal

I am currently pursuing my doctoral studies in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Delhi, under the enlightening guidance of Subhashis Banerjee and Subodh Sharma. My research has also greatly benefited from insightful technical contributions by Mahavir Jhawar from Ashoka University. 


In my thesis, I have focused on developing robust and secure voting protocols suitable for large public elections, such as the Indian elections. More generally, my research interests lie at the intersection of applied cryptography, privacy enhancing technologies and computers and society at large. 

Concurrently, I serve as a Research Associate at the Centre for Digitalisation, AI and Society (CDAIS) at Ashoka University. I'm also scouting for postdoc opportunities – preferably ones that don’t involve counting millions of paper ballots by hand!

Publications

with Kabir Tomer, Abhinav Nakarmi, Mahavir Jhawar, Subodh Sharma, and Subhashis Banerjee

A novel approach for efficiently recovering from audit failures in dual voting systems, blending the cryptographic security of E2E-V with the simplicity of VVPR audits. It focuses on localising failures at specific polling booths, enhancing election integrity without compromising voter secrecy, thereby offering a robust solution for large, multi-polling booth elections.

with Abhinav Nakarmi, Mahavir Jhawar, Subodh Sharma, Subhashis Banerjee

A powerful extension of traditional mixnet capabilities to allow specific query responses about ciphertext-plaintext associations while strictly preserving anonymity. Achieved through novel distributed zero-knowledge proofs of set and reverse set membership, ensuring no mix-server learns more than necessary. The implementation demonstrates a significant efficiency advantage, outperforming current methods by an order of magnitude.

An inquiry into protecting electoral rolls or voter lists from manipulation, while protecting the privacy harms from completely public electoral rolls.

A novel operational architecture that integrates privacy-by-design principles for public service databases, addressing key challenges in data protection, access control, and regulatory oversight.

Ongoing projects

with Aarav Varshney and Mahavir Jhawar

An anonymous proof of account ownership (PAO) lets a prover anonymously prove to a verifier that it owns an account at a service provider, without requiring any changes at the service provider or even revealing to it that such an anonymous PAO is taking place. This project proposes a much simpler and generalisable scheme than past anonymous PAO schemes based on custom MPC protocols.

with Mukundan A, Debayan Gupta, Subhashis Banerjee


An inquiry into the security and privacy aspects of India's digital payments infrastructure UPI. We compile an abstract operational model of UPI extracted from various official and unofficial UPI documents, propose security definitions respecting UPI's real-world constraints and design goals, and analyse the existing deployment with respect to these definitions.