The Applied Cryptography Research lab is seeking interested students to help with a variety of projects in applied cryptography and network security.

Cryptography has shown itself to be invaluable in everyday life, especially as more and more devices and interactions are moving to the online world.  Whether it is browsing the web, making a purchase, or sending a message to a friend, cryptography is everywhere.  Despite the fact that users (often unknowingly) rely on the security of systems that use cryptography, recent years have seen a number of serious vulnerabilities in the cryptographic pieces of systems, some with large consequences.  These have been caused by various problems, including poor designs, difficulty of implementation, and use (or misuse) of (in)secure primitives.

The Applied Cryptography Research lab focuses on practical and applied cryptography, namely the design and analysis of real world cryptographic systems. We aim to make it easier to design and securely deploy new and complex cryptographic systems while preventing insecurities from occurring in such systems. While this currently involves a large amount of manual work, my goal is to instrument many of these processes through the use of cryptographic automation, including automating the discovery of cryptographic vulnerabilities and building tools to aid in the deployment of complex cryptography.

Some skills and knowledge that might be helpful (but are definitely not required) for working on our various projects are:
- A basic understanding of cryptography
- Background on zero-knowledge proofs and anonymous credentials
- Onion Routing (specifically Tor) and anonymous communication networks
- SGX
- Software security (fuzzing, binary analysis)
- Programming experience in C/C++, Python, or Rust
- Coursework: CS355 Cryptography (or equivalent), CS422 Computer Networks (or equivalent), CS426 Computer Security (or equivalent)

Please contact me at clg@cs.purdue.edu if you have any questions.