In this talk, I will give a broad introduction to research in cryptography. I will highlight several intriguing problems, ranging from foundational theoretical questions to challenges with significant practical and industry relevance, and illustrate how many of the techniques used to address them arise from elegant mathematical ideas. I will briefly discuss classical problems such as key exchange and public-key encryption, and then touch upon tools such as private set intersection and zero-knowledge proofs, which form important building blocks for private and verifiable computation used across many real-world applications and industries.

Bio: Sruthi Sekar is an assistant professor in the department of computer science and engineering at IIT Bombay, where she is part of the Theory group and Trust Lab. Sruthi did her PhD at IISc Bangalore, and spent her postdoctoral years at the University of California in Berkeley, before moving to IIT Bombay. Her research interests are broadly in Theoretical Computer Science, with a focus on Cryptography.