Mirza Ahad Baig

I am a PhD Student in the Pietrzak Group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA).  I am fortunate to be advised by Krzysztof Pietrzak. I am primarily interested in cryptography and distributed computing, but more broadly, I am interested in practically motivated problems in Theoretical Computer Science.  Recently I have been working on theoretical aspects of blockchains and integrity of machine-learning models. 

Before starting PhD, I earned an MSc at Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI) in 2019. I was fortunate to be advised by Alessia Milani, LABRI for my MSc Thesis.  Even before that, I gained a BSc (Hons) at Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI) in 2017. 

• Journal

  1. Long-lived counters with polylogarithmic amortized step complexity.
     Mirza Ahad Baig, Danny Hendler, Alessia Milani, Corentin Travers
     Distributed Computing Vol 36

• Conference

  1. Nakamoto Consensus from Multiple Resources. [pdf]
     Mirza Ahad Baig, Chritoph U Günther, Kryzsztof Pietrzak
     AFT 2025

  2. Securely instantiating ‘half gates’ garbling in the standard model. [pdf]
     Anasuya Acharya, Karen Azari, Mirza Ahad Baig, Dennis Hofheinz, Chethan Kamath
     PKC 2025

  3. On the (in)security of Proofs-of-Space based Longest-Chain Blockchains. [pdf]
     Mirza Ahad Baig, Krzysztof Pietrzak
     FC 2025

  4. The Cost of Maintaining Keys in Dynamic Groups with Applications to Multicast Encryption and Group Messaging. [eprint]
     Michael Anastos, Benedikt Auerbach, Mirza Ahad Baig, Miguel Cueto Noval, Matthew Kwan, Guillermo Pascual-Perez, Krzysztof Pietrzak
     TCC 2024

  5.  Efficiently Testable Circuits Without Conductivity.  [eprint]
     Mirza Ahad Baig, Suvradip Chakraborty, Stefan Dziembowski, Malgorzata Galazka, Tomasz Lizurej, Krzysztof Pietrzak
     TCC 2023

  6. Efficiently Testable Circuits. [eprint]
     Mirza Ahad Baig, Suvradip Chakraborty, Stefan Dziembowski, Malgorzata Galazka, Tomasz Lizurej, Krzysztof Pietrzak
     ITCS 2023

  7. Grafting Key Trees: Efficient Key Management for Overlapping Groups. [eprint]
     Joël Alwen, Benedikt Auerbach, Mirza Ahad Baig, Miguel Cueto Noval, Karen Klein, Guillermo Pascual-Perez, Krzysztof Pietrzak, Michael Walter
     TCC 2021

  8. Long-Lived Snapshots with Polylogarithmic Amortized Step Complexity. [pdf]
     Mirza Ahad Baig, Danny Hendler, Alessia Milani, Corentin Travers
     PODC 2020

  9. Long-Lived Counters with Polylogarithmic Amortized Step Complexity. [pdf]
     Mirza Ahad Baig, Danny Hendler, Alessia Milani, Corentin Travers
     DISC 2019
     Invited to the special issue of the Distributed Computing journal.  

• Thesis

  1. Long-Lived Non-Blocking Counters With Polylogarithmic Step Complexity.
     MSc Thesis

1. Tragedy of Chain Commons. [pdf]
   Mirza Ahad Baig, Seth Gilbert, Ray Neiheiser, Michelle Yeo
   In Submission

2. “Inver: An Inference Verification System for Large Language Models. [pdf]
   Mirza Ahad Baig, Ruta Jawale, Darya Kaviani, Wei Qi, Alon Rosen
   In Submission

1. Research Visit, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB), Mumbai, India
   Prof Chethan Kamath
   Feb 2025

2. Research Visit, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB), Mumbai, India
   Prof Chethan Kamath
   Oct 2024

3. Research Visit, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy
   Prof Alon Rosen
   Feb 2024

4. Research Intern, Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique (LaBRI), Bordeaux, France
   Prof Alessia Milani
   May 2019 - July 2019

5. Research Intern, Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique (LaBRI), Bordeaux, France
   Prof Alessia Milani
   Sep 2018 - Dec 2018

6. Blockchain Research Fellow, Xoxen Labs, Bangalore, India
   May 2018 - July 2018

7. Research Intern, IRIF, Université Paris Diderot, Paris, France
   Prof Constantin Enea
   May 2017 - July 2017

8. Research Intern, Chennai Mathematical Institute, Chennai, India
   Prof Aishwarya Cyriac
   May 2016 - July 2016

9. Research Intern, Chennai Mathematical Institute, Chennai, India
   Prof Rajiv Raman
   May 2015 - July 2015

1. Workshop on Cryptographic Tools for Blockchains (affiliated with Eurocrypt 2025)
   Madrid, Spain
   May 2025

2. Conceptual Challenges in AI (Workshop),
   Bocconi University, Milan, Italy
   May 2024 

3. The 2nd IACR Summer School on Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning,
   IDEAS NCBR, Warsaw, Poland
   Aug 2023 

4. IACR-CROSSING School on Combinatorial Techniques in Cryptography,
   Valetta, Malta
   April 2022

• Sub-reviewer for DISC 2025, CRYPTO 2024, PKC 2024 

1. Quantitative Research Consultant (Part-Time)
   WorldQuant LLC
   Nov 2015 - Aug 2019

• I speak Hindi (mother tongue), English (fluent), Urdu (fluent), Punjabi (elementary), French (A2), and German (A1). 

• I'm certified in basic mountaineering. 

• When not doing research, I could be found in a climbing gym or hiking in the Austrian Alps.