Ashish Choudhury

Research Monographs

As a PhD student, I struggled to find good research monographs that provided a good introduction to the topics I was researching. Almost everything was available in old seminal research papers, many of which were not easily readable. The situation has changed slightly, but I still feel there are few suitable, easily legible introductory materials for beginners in my research area. Motivated by this, Arpita Patra and I wrote the following research monographs. The first one is on secure multi-party computation, where we covered only semi-honest/passive security, as there was so much to cover in that topic itself. We did our best to make the book accessible to a general audience without any cryptography background. The book can be purchased using this link.  Free online video lectures based on the book's contents are also available at this link. 

The second research monograph is on fault-tolerant distributed consensus (a.k.a Byzantine agreement). Traditionally, consensus protocols are studied either in synchronous or asynchronous communication settings, and very often, the protocols in the former category serve as the basis for the latter. The focus of this monograph is on the synchronous communication setting. The monograph presents all the seminal possibility and feasibility results in this model ever since the inception of the consensus problem, with formal security proofs. Even though the synchronous corruption model may seem weaker than the more practical asynchronous communication model, designing protocols in the synchronous model turns out to be non-trivial and demands sophisticated and highly advanced techniques. Moreover, understanding protocols in the synchronous setting often constitute the first stepping stone to understanding the more complex asynchronous consensus protocols. The book can be purchased using this link. 

Past Students:

In the past, I was very fortunate to work with the following iM.Tech and M.Tech students, who did their thesis under me and who are now pursuing PhD/research careers at various top universities/research groups.  

• Naganad Yadati (M.Tech 2016, now postdoc at National University of Singapore)

• Yashvanth Kondi (iM.Tech 2017, now a postdoc at Aarhus University)

• Laasya Bangalore (iM.Tech 2018, now PhD student at Georgetown University)

• Gayathri Garimella (iM.Tech 2018, now PhD student at Oregon State University)

• Rishabh Bhadauria (iM.Tech 2018, now PhD student at Bar-Ilan University)

• Rahul Rachuri (i.M.Tech 2019, now PhD student at Aarhus University)

• Aditya Hegde (i.M.Tech 2020, now PhD student at John Hopkins University)

• Nikhil Pappu (i.M.Tech 2020, now PhD student at Portland State University)

• Anirudh Chanramouli (i.M.Tech 2022, now PhD student at Bar-Ilan University)

• Ananya Appan (i.M.Tech 2022, will be joining as a PhD student at UIUC)

Miscellaneous:

I was born and brought up in the wonderful city of Jabalpur, also known as Sanskardharni. I was briefly an assistant professor at the department of computer science and engineering, Jadavpur university, before joining IIIT Bangalore. 

I am very fortunate to have a better half, who is a renowned cryptographer and a wonderful photographer. I am a fitness freak person. Earlier I used to go to gym regularly, but now I have switched to natural forms of exercises like yoga, jogging and cycling. Earlier I was very active on Facebook.