Preparing Cryptography for Deployment

The excitement around privacy enhancing technologies powered by cryptographic techniques, including zero-knowledge proofs, secure multiparty computation, and differential privacy, continues to grow. This excitement has been memorialized by an increasing number of real-world deployments and many policy memos. My research makes cryptography ready for real-world deployment in three ways: (1) improving the performance of core cryptographic primitives, (2) exploring the applicability of cryptographic protocols to new problems, and (3) studying the social-technical contexts with which we deploy cryptography in order to improve the chances that a deployment will be successful. In pursuing these research directions, I draw on techniques that span theoretical cryptography, applied cryptography, and human-centered computing. In this talk I will give an example of recent or ongoing work in each of these threads and argue that each of them is critical to realizing the promise of privacy enhancing technologies.