David Wu
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Computer Science·Early-career
Encryption protects nearly everything sent over the Internet, and new tools now aim to protect computations run on cloud servers as well. Many advanced versions of these tools depend on trusting a central authority or on special, structured mathematical assumptions.
- Fields
Computer Science
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
cryptography
theoretical computer science
functional encryption
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Sep 2027
What they work on
- Construct functional encryption schemes such as attribute-based and broadcast encryption in a registration-based model, where an untrusted, transparent key aggregator combines user-registered public keys into one short key.
- Develop multi-authority encryption schemes in which many independent key-issuing authorities replace a single trusted one, so that one compromised authority does not break system security.
- Build privacy-preserving cryptographic proof systems with small proof sizes from general, unstructured cryptographic assumptions rather than specialized ones.
- Clarify connections between cryptographic proof systems and primitives like public-key and witness encryption to find routes to these primitives from simpler assumptions.
More about the research
If that authority is compromised, or the assumptions fail, security collapses. Both projects ask how much trust and how many assumptions powerful cryptography truly needs.
Why it matters
Removing the need for a single trusted key authority could make fine-grained encrypted access control safer for organizations that share sensitive data, since one breach would no longer expose every message. Proof systems built from simpler assumptions could give cloud users stronger guarantees that outsourced computations are correct and private.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jason LeGrow
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Computer Science
Construct post-quantum blind signatures, threshold signatures and multisignatures based on lattices, error-correcting codes and group actions such as isogenies, maps between elliptic curves.
Alan Mislove
Northeastern University, MA·Computer Science
Design revocation schemes for TLS certificates in the Web Public Key Infrastructure based on cryptographic accumulators, compact summaries of large sets, to make certificate revocation more practical and far-reaching.
Omkant Pandey
Stony Brook University, NY·Computer Science·Early-career
Construct secure multi-party computation protocols that remain secure when many sessions run concurrently and the adversary is a quantum computer, closing open questions in post-quantum secure computation.
The school
University of Texas at Austin: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.1B a year on research, 871 research doctorates a year.
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