Pratik Sarkar
About Me
A hearty welcome to my homepage! I am a Research Scientist in the Cryptography team of Supra Research. Previously, I completed my Ph.D. in Cryptography from Boston University. I had the pleasure and good fortune to be part of the BUSec group and supervised by the ever supportive Ran Canetti. In the summer of 2021, I was a Research Scientist intern with the Advanced Cryptography team at VISA Research. In the summer of 2022, I was a Research Engineer intern with the Statistics and Privacy team at Meta.
Prior to embarking on the Ph.D. journey, I completed my Master's degree at the Department of Computer Science at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, where I was working under the supervision of Dr. Arpita Patra in the Cryptography and Information Security Lab.
Research Interests
I work as a researcher in Cryptography and Information Security, focusing on developing Privacy-Preserving solutions to different problems using cryptographic tools such as Multiparty Computation (MPC), Zero Knowledge (ZK) proofs, and other primitives. During my internship with the VISA Research team, I contributed to the isogeny-based Post-Quantum secure cryptographic solutions. I have also worked in Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning and conducting statistical analysis on client data while maintaining their privacy.
Currently, I am a Research Scientist at SupraOracles, working in the Cryptography team. Here, I am involved in theoretical modeling and pushing the practical boundaries of state-of-the-art Blockchain technologies. I will be soon posting my exciting new works in this space.
Contact
Email ID: iampratiksarkar at gmail dot com
Linkedin ID: iampratiksarkar
News
June 2024: I gave a talk on InstaRand at the Web3 randomness workshop organized by Supra
May 2024: I am serving on the program committee of IEEE S&P 2025
February 2024: Our work Mastic (follow-up to PLASMA) on Privacy-Preserving Data and Attribute-Based Aggregation is available on Eprint and the corresponding VDAF draft is available on IETF
February 2024: Our work PLASMA on Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation got accepted at PETS'24
November 2023: Our joint work, CompactTag for Privacy-Preserving Neural Networks, is available on Eprint
October 2023: Dimitris presented our new IETF draft Mastic for Secure Data Aggregation at the IETF meeting
October 2023: Uploaded the first draft of Verifiable Distributed Aggregatable Functions (Mastic) on IETF
September 2023: Joined Supra Research as a Research Scientist, Cryptography
August 2023: Graduated from Boston University with a PhD in Computer Science
June 2023: Defended my PhD thesis
May 2023: Presented my VISA Research internship work on Post-Quantum Secure Computation from Isogenies at PKC'23
April 2023: Presented PLASMA in the poster session of the RSA conference as an RSA Security Scholar
April 2023: Chaya Ganesh presented our joint work on Reverse Firewalls at Eurocrypt'23
March 2023: Dimitris Mouris presented our joint work PLASMA at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting
February 2023: Our work on Reverse Firewalls got accepted at Eurocrypt'23
February 2023: Our work on Post-Quantum Secure Computation from Isogenies got accepted at PKC'23
January 2023: Our work PLASMA on Private Statistics is published on Eprint
December 2022: Presented Triply Adaptive UC-NIZK at Asiacrypt'22
November 2022: Presented Statistical Security in Two-Party Computation Revisited at TCC'22.
October 2022: Selected as RSA Conference Security Scholar in area of Cryptography and Security
October 2022: Completed my Summer internship at Meta
May 2022: Started my Summer internship at the Statistics and Privacy team, Meta
Awards and Achievements
RSA Conference (2023) Security Scholar
PhD is funded by the DARPA SIEVE program and NSF grants
Finalist for Facebook PhD Fellowship 2022 in Security and Privacy
CCS'21 Best Paper Runner-up
Recipient of Boston University PhD Chair Fellowship
Received Grant for Masters project titled Computing on private data in high latency networks from Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber-Physical Systems, IISc Bangalore.
Publications
My updated list of works can be found below. They can also be found on dblp and google scholar.
(Author names are arranged in alphabetical order since the area of cryptography follows the mathematical tradition of alphabetizing author lists)
2024
VRaaS: Verifiable Randomness as a Service on Blockchains. Jacob Gorman, Lucjan Hanzlik, Aniket Kate, Easwar Vivek Mangipudi, Pratyay Mukherjee, Pratik Sarkar, Sri AravindaKrishnan Thyagarajan, Full Version
PLASMA: Private, Lightweight Aggregated Statistics against Malicious Adversaries. Dimitris Mouris, Pratik Sarkar, Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos, PETS 2024, Full Version
Mastic: Private Weighted Heavy-Hitters and Attribute-Based Metrics. Dimitris Mouris, Christopher Patton, Hannah Davis, Pratik Sarkar, Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos, Full Version
2023
Reverse Firewalls for Oblivious Transfer Extension and Applications to Zero-Knowledge. Suvradip Chakraborty, Chaya Ganesh, Pratik Sarkar, Eurocrypt 2023, Full Version
Round-Optimal Oblivious Transfer and MPC from Computational CSIDH. Saikrishna Badrinarayanan, Daniel Masny, Pratyay Mukherjee, Sikhar Patranabis, Srinivasan Raghuraman, Pratik Sarkar, PKC 2023, Full Version
CompactTag: Minimizing Computation Overheads in Actively-Secure MPC for Deep Neural Networks. Yongqin Wang, Pratik Sarkar, Nishat Koti, Arpita Patra, Murali Annavaram Full Version
2022
Triply Adaptive UC NIZK. Ran Canetti, Pratik Sarkar and Xiao Wang, Asiacrypt 2022, Full Version
Statistical Security in Two-Party Computation Revisited. Saikrishna Badrinarayanan, Sikhar Patranabis and Pratik Sarkar, TCC 2022, Full Version
2021
Reverse Firewalls for Adaptively Secure MPC without Setup. Suvradip Chakraborty, Chaya Ganesh, Mahak Pancholi and Pratik Sarkar, Asiacrypt 2021, Full Version
Two-Round Adaptively Secure MPC from Isogenies, LPN, or CDH. Navid Alamati, Hart Montgomery, Sikhar Patranabis and Pratik Sarkar, Asiacrypt 2021, Full Version
Quicksilver: Efficient and Affordable Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Circuits and Polynomials over Any Field. Kang Yang, Pratik Sarkar, Chenkai Weng and Xiao Wang, CCS 2021 (Best Paper Runner-Up), Full Version
2020
Efficient and Round-Optimal Oblivious Transfer and Commitment with Adaptive Security. Ran Canetti, Pratik Sarkar and Xiao Wang, Asiacrypt 2020, Full Version
Blazing Fast OT for Three-Round UC OT Extension. Ran Canetti, Pratik Sarkar and Xiao Wang, PKC 2020, Full Version
2018
Efficient Adaptively Secure Zero-knowledge from Garbled Circuits. Chaya Ganesh, Yashvanth Kondi, Arpita Patra and Pratik Sarkar, PKC 2018, Full Version
Crash-Tolerant Consensus in Directed Graph Revisited (Extended Abstract). Ashish Choudhury, Gayathri Garimella, Arpita Patra, Divya Ravi, Pratik Sarkar, SIROCCO 2018, Full Version
2017
Fast Actively Secure OT Extension for Short Secrets. Arpita Patra, Pratik Sarkar, Ajith Suresh, NDSS 2017, Full Version
Crash-Tolerant Consensus in Directed Graph Revisited. Ashish Choudhury, Gayathri Garimella, Arpita Patra, Divya Ravi, Pratik Sarkar, Brief Announcement, DISC 2017, Full Version
Fast and Universally-Composable Oblivious Transfer and Commitment Scheme with Adaptive Security. Megha Byali, Arpita Patra, Divya Ravi and Pratik Sarkar, Full Version
2014
Towards a More Democratic Mining in Bitcoins. Goutam Paul, Pratik Sarkar, Sarbajit Mukherjee, ICISS 2014
Teaching
Spring 2021: CS 538 Fundamentals of Cryptography
Fall 2019: CS 538 Fundamentals of Cryptography
Fall 2018: CS 538 Fundamentals of Cryptography
Activities
Program Committee Participation: IEEE S&P 2025
External Reviewer for Asiacrypt 2017-2022, Public Key Cryptography 2017-2018, Eurocrypt 2018, Crypto 2019-2023, IEEE S&P 2020, 23-24, Asiacrypt 2020, Indocrypt 2020, Eurocrypt 2020-2024, STOC 2020, TCC 2019-2023, Journal of Cryptology, CCS 2021.
Member of Cryptology Research Society of India
Member of IACR (International Association for Cryptologic Research)
Presented papers in Asiacrypt 2020-22, PKC 2020, ICISS 2014, TCC 2022