Raluca Ada Popa
   Ph.D. Candidate

   32 Vassar St., 32-G982

   Cambridge, MA 02139

   Email: raluca AT csail DOT mit DOT edu

Research

I am interested in systems security and, in particular, I love the combination of systems and cryptography. I enjoy building secure systems with solid cryptographic foundations.

Much of my recent research is focused on enabling systems (with their computations) to run on encrypted data. Here is why: there are many confidentiality attacks an untrusted component could undergo, and designing solutions for each attack is impossible; but having the untrusted component manipulate only encrypted data promises a cleaner end-to-end solution to these various problems.

Below is a description of my projects so far (both from graduate and undergraduate years).

Recent and ongoing projects:

• SQL over encrypted data: CryptDB - checkout the webpage!
  CryptDB is a database management system that runs queries on an encrypted database without decrypting the data. This approach protects sensitive data even against attackers with root access to the database server because attackers can only obtain encrypted data. Our SOSP 2011 paper describes the approach. CryptDB was selected as a CACM Research Highlight. CryptDB is joint work with Prof. Nickolai Zeldovich and Prof. Hari Balakrishnan.
  • Press covering CryptDB: Forbes Magazine, Slashdot, Hacker News


• Functional encryption
  Functional encryption is a useful tool for computing on encrypted data. For example, it can be used to reduce the blowup in runtime givey by fully homomorphic encryption, the existing tool for computing on encrypted data. We provide the first construction of functional encryption with short ciphertexts for generic functions. A paper is in submission, but meanwhile checkout our Crypto ePrint paper. This is joint work with Prof. Shafi Goldwasser, Dr. Yael Kalai, Prof. Vinod Vaikuntanathan and Prof. Nickolai Zeldovich.


• Order-preserving encryption
  Order-preserving encryption is useful to compute SQL order queries on an encrypted database in an efficient way. We provide the first construction of an order-preserving scheme that achieves the ideal notion of security put forth in the literature. A paper is in submission.
  

Past projects:

• Location privacy: VPriv and PrivStats - checkout the webpage!
  My work was on protecting the privacy of drivers or peers in a social network, while enabling interesting location-based applications.  Our first project, VPriv, enables application servers to compute functions on the paths of drivers (e.g., total tolls for path in a month) without learning the path of the drivers.  Our second project, PrivStats,  preserves location privacy while computing aggregate statistics over location data (e.g., traffic congestion). Check out our Usenix Security 2009 and CCS 2011 papers, joint work with Prof. Hari Balakrishnan and Prof. Andrew J. Blumberg.


• Cloud storage security: CloudProof
  I built a cloud storage security protocol with mentors Helen J. Wang and Jay Lorch during my internship at Microsoft Research, Redmond. Most cloud storage systems do not guarantee security (e.g., confidentiality and integrity of data as well as some desirable consistency and freshness properties); CloudProof detects efficiently if these properties were not satisfied and provides proofs that can be verified by any outside party when they are not. Check out our USENIX 2011 paper.


• Electronic voting security.
  Together with Professor Ronald L. Rivest and Professor Javed A. Aslam, we worked on designing effective techniques for auditing eletronic elections: detecting election fraud with high probability. We applied theoretical computer science and mathematics (such as combinatorics, probability, game theory, and algorithms) to electronic voting. Our first project provided estimates of the number of precincts or votes that need to be sampled in order to achieve a desired level of confidence that the election result is correct. Our second project was proposing more efficient auditing procedures than the ones in the literature by taking advantage of the observation that precincts have different sizes and thus may represent different benefits to an adversary. Check out our EVT 2007 and EVT 2008 papers.


• Byzantine fault tolerant systems.
  I worked in the PMG group with Professor Barbara Liskov in Byzantine Fault Tolerant systems. I designed and implemented a Byzantine fault tolerant cooperative caching system and I also worked on a second system, Census, whose goal was to build a very scalable consistent membership service that is resilient to fail-stop and Byzantine clients. For details, see our USENIX 2009 paper on Census.


• Software bugs: MUVI
  I worked on detecting concurrency bugs in operating systems code with Professor Yuanyuan Zhou from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Opera research group. My internship was sponsored by the CRA - Women Distributed Mentor Project Award for Summer Research. MUVI, our tool found quite a few bugs in Linux and Mozilla: check out our SOSP 2007 paper.

Publications

• (Alphabetical author order - theory paper:) Shafi Goldwasser, Yael Kalai, Raluca Ada Popa, Vinod Vaikuntanathan, and Nickolai Zeldovich.
  Overcoming the Worst-Case Curse for Cryptographic Constructions.
  To appear in the Proceedings of the 33th International Cryptology Conference (CRYPTO'13), August 2013.
  


• (Alphabetical author order - theory paper:) Shafi Goldwasser, Yael Kalai, Raluca Ada Popa, Vinod Vaikuntanathan, and Nickolai Zeldovich.
  Reusable Garbled Circuits and Succinct Functional Encryption.
  In the Proceedings of the 45th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC'13), June 2013.


• Raluca Ada Popa, Frank H. Li, and Nickolai Zeldovich.
  An Ideal-Security Protocol for Order-Preserving Encoding.
  In the Proceedings of the 34th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P/Oakland'13), May 2013.


• Raluca Ada Popa, Catherine M. S. Redfield, Nickolai Zeldovich, and Hari Balakrishnan.
  CryptDB: Processing Queries on an Encrypted Database.
  CACM Research Highlight, Communications of the ACM, 55(9):103-111, September 2012, with accompanying technical perspective.


• Meelap Shah, Emily Stark, Raluca Ada Popa, and Nickolai Zeldovich.
  Language Support for Efficient Computation over Encrypted Data.
  In Off the Beaten Track Workshop: Underrepresented Problems for Programming Language Researchers, January 2012.
  

• Raluca Ada Popa and Nickolai Zeldovich
  Cryptographic Treatment of CryptDB's Adjustable Join.
  MIT-CSAIL-TR-2012-006, March 2012.


• Raluca Ada Popa, Catherine M. S. Redfield, Nickolai Zeldovich, and Hari Balakrishnan.
  CryptDB: Protecting Confidentiality with Encrypted Query Processing. [BibTeX]
  In the Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'11), October 2011.


• Raluca Ada Popa, Andrew J. Blumberg, Hari Balakrishnan, and Frank H. Li.
  Privacy and Accountability for Location-Based Aggregate Statistics. [BibTeX]
  In the Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'11), October 2011.


• Raluca Ada Popa, Alessandro Chiesa, Tural Badirkhanli, and Muriel Médard.
  Going Beyond Pollution Attacks: Forcing Byzantine Clients to Code Correctly.
  CoRR abs/1108.2080: 2011.


• Raluca Ada Popa, Jay Lorch, David Molnar, Helen J. Wang, and Li Zhuang.
  Enabling Security in Cloud Storage SLAs with CloudProof. [BibTeX]
  In the Proceedings of the 2011 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX'11), June 2011.
  Also as a tech report, TechReport MSR-TR-2010-46.


• Carlo Curino, Evan P. C. Jones, Raluca Ada Popa, Nirmesh Malviya, Eugene Wu, Sam Madden, Hari Balakrishnan, and Nickolai Zeldovich.
  Relational Cloud: A Database-as-a-Service for the Cloud. [BibTeX]
  5th Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR'11), January 2011.


• Raluca Ada Popa.
  Provable and Practical Location Privacy for Vehicular and Mobile Systems.
  Masters thesis. Awarded the 2010 Charles and Jennifer Johnson award for best CS Masters of Engineering thesis.


• Raluca Ada Popa, Hari Balakrishnan, and Andrew J. Blumberg.
  Protecting Privacy in Location-Based Vehicular Services. [BibTeX]
  In the proceedings of the 18th USENIX Security Symposium, (USENIX SECURITY'09), August 2009.


• James Cowling, Dan Ports, Barbara Liskov, Raluca Ada Popa, and Abhijeet Gaikwad.
  Census: Location-Aware Membership Management for Large-Scale Distributed Systems. [BibTeX]
  In the proceedings of the 2009 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX'09), June 2009.


• Javed A. Aslam, Raluca Ada Popa, and Ronald L. Rivest.
  On Auditing Elections When Precincts Have Different Sizes. [BibTeX]
  In the Proceedings of the 2008 USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop (EVT'08), July 2008.


• Javed A. Aslam, Raluca Ada Popa, and Ronald L. Rivest.
  On Estimating the Size and Confidence of a Statistical Audit. [BibTeX]
  In the Proceedings of the 2007 USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop (EVT'07) held in conjunction with the 16th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2008.


• Shan Lu, Soyeon Park, Chongfeng Hu, Xiao Ma, Weihang Jiang, Zhenmin Li, Raluca Ada Popa, and Yuanyuan Zhou.
  MUVI: Automatically Inferring Multi-Variable Access Correlations and Detecting Related Semantic and Concurrency Bugs. [BibTeX]
  In the Proceedings of the 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'07), October 2007.
  

Talks

• Succinct Functional Encryption and Applications: Reusable Garbled Circuits and Beyond.
  
  • Talk at the NYC Crypto Day, Columbia University, NYC, January 2013.
  • Talk at Stanford's security group, Stanford, CA, January 2013.
  • Talk at the Boston University's security seminar, Boston, MA, December 2012.


• CryptDB: Protecting Confidentiality with Encrypted Query Processing.
  I had the chance to be invited in many places to talk about CryptDB, some of which are:
  • Real-world cryptography workshop, Stanford University, Palo Alto, January 2013.
  • Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, November 2012.
  • University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, August 2012. [pptx]
  • IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY, June 2012.
  • Conference talk, 23rd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'11), October 2011. [pptx]
  • BBN Technologies, Cambridge, MA, June 2011.
  • Quanta Research, Boston, MA, May 2011.
  • Berkeley’s Cloud Computing Seminar, April 2011.
  • Berkeley’s Security Seminar, April 2011.
  • New England Database day, Cambridge, MA, January 2011, (NEDB'11).
    
  
  
• Privacy and Accountability for Location-Based Aggregate Statistics.
  Conference talk: 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'11), Chicago, IL, October 2011. [pptx]


• Enabling Security in Cloud Storage SLAs with CloudProof.
  Talk at the 2011 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX'11), Portland, OR, June 2011. [pdf]


• Enabling Security in Cloud SLAs.
  End of internship talk at Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, September 2009.


• VPriv: Protecting Privacy in Location-Based Vehicular Services.
  Talk at the 18th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX SECURITY'09), Montreal, Canada, June 2009. [pdf]


• Protecting Privacy in Location-Based Vehicular Services.
  Invited talk at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Security Seminar, Amherst, MA, November 2008.


• On Auditing Elections When Precincts Have Different Sizes.
  Talk presented at 2008 USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop (EVT'08) held in conjunction with 17th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2008, San Jose, CA. [pdf]


• On Estimating the Size and Confidence of a Statistical Audit.
  Talk presented at 2007 USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop (EVT'07) held in conjunction with 16th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2007, Boston, MA. [ppt]

Mentoring & Teaching

I have enjoyed mentoring and working with younger students. I was happy to be the mentor of Catherine M.S. Redfield for two years, 2010-2012: one year, she was an undergraduate researcher with us, and the following year she earned her Master's degree with us. I am equally happy to mentor Frank H. Li during his undergraduate work with us, 2011-present. I also mentored other students for semester-long projects.

I am a teaching assistant for 6.857 Computer and Network Security for Spring 2013, and I am teaching a weekly recitation.

In the past, I have tutored students for the Office of Minority Education at MIT, during 2007-2009.

Activities

Awards

Graduate School:

- 2011 Google Ph.D. Fellowship for Secure Cloud Computing

- 2010 Charles and Jennifer Johnson award for best CS Masters of Engineering thesis

- 2010 Morris Joseph Levin Award for best MasterWorks presentation

- 2009 MIT Jacobs Presidential Fellowship for graduate studies

Senior Year at MIT:

- 2009 MIT CSAIL Pogosyants Award for Undergraduate Research

Junior Year at MIT:

-  2008 Google Anita Borg Scholarship, Winner

- 2008 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award, Runner Up, Female Award (Fall 2007)

Sophomore Year at MIT:

- Letter of Recognition for 6.002 ("Circuits and Electronics") (Fall 2006) - top student in the class (~ 200 students)

- Best Game Award and George C. Newton Outstanding Undergraduate Laboratory Project Prize, Third Place - for the final project in 6.170 ("Laboratory in Software Engineering") (Spring 2007)

- Letter of Recognition for 6.004 ("Computation Structures") (Fall 2006)

Freshman Year at Caltech

- Caltech Upper Class Merit Award, Carnation Scholarship

- CRA - Women Distributed Mentor Project Award for Summer Research

High school ("Gheorghe Lazar" National College) in Sibiu, Romania

- Graduating as Valedictorian

Academic Courses

Here is a list of only the relevant science classes I took (humanities and other unrelated classes are not included).

Graduate school:

- 6.897 ("Cloud Computing"), A, Prof. Hari Balakrishnan
- 6.889 ("New Developments in Cryptography"), A, Prof. Shafi Goldwasser
- 6.S898 ("The Evolution of a Proof"), A, Prof. Shafi Goldwasser

- 6.845 ("Quantum Complexity Theory"), A+, Prof. Scott Aaronson

- 6.867 ("Machine Learning"), A, Prof. Tommi Jaakkola

GPA: 5.0/5.0

Senior year at MIT:

Spring 2009:

- 6.857 ("Computer and Networks Security"), A+, Prof. Ronald L. Rivest

- 6.989 ("Network Coding"), A, Prof. Muriel Medard

- 8.282 ("Introduction to Astronomy"), A+, Prof. Max Tegmark

- 18.443 ("Statistics for Applications"), A, Prof. R. M. Dudley 

Fall 2008:

- 6.854 ("Advanced Algorithms"), A+, Prof. Michel X. Goemans

- 6.830 ("Database Systems"), A, Prof. Samuel Madden

- 6.UAP ("Thesis"), A+, Prof. Hari Balakrishnan

Junior year at MIT:

Spring 2008:

- 6.829 (Graduate Level,  "Computer Networks"), A, Prof. Hari Balakrishnan

- 6.875 (Graduate Level, "Cryptography and Cryptanalysis"), A, Prof. Silvio Micali

- 6.003 ("Signals and Processing"), A, Prof. Qing Hu

- 6.UAT ("Preparation for Undergraduate Advanced Project"- presentations class), A+, Prof. Tony Eng

Fall 2007:

- 6.824 (Graduate level, "Distributed Systems"), A, Prof. Frans Kaashoek

- 6.828 (Graduate level, "Operating System Engineering"),  A, Prof. Robert Morris

- 18.821 ("Project Laboratory in Mathematics"), A, Prof. David Vogan

Sophomore year at MIT:

Spring 2007:
- 6.170 ("Laboratory in Software Engineering"), A+, Best Game Award, Prof. Saman Amarasinghe, Prof. Michael D. Ernst
- 18.440 ("Probability and Random Variables"), A+,  Prof. Shan-Yuan Ho

- 6.033 ("Computer Systems Engineering"), A, Prof. M. Frans Kaashoek, Prof. Barbara Liskov

Fall 2006:
- 6.002 (Circuits and Electronics), A+, Finished 1st in class, Prof. Jesus A. del Alamo
- 6.004 (Computation Structures), A, Awarded letter of recognition, Prof. Srini Devadas and Prof. Steve Ward
- 6.034 (Artificial Intelligence), A, Prof. Patrick H. Winston
- 18.03 (Differential Equations), A+, Prof. Alar Toomre

GPA: 5.0/5.0

Freshman at Caltech:

Spring 2006:
- Cs38 (Introduction to Algorithms), A
- Ma1c Analytical Track (Calculus of one and several variables and linear algebra), A+
- Ph1c Practical Track (Classical Mechanics and Electromagnetism), A+
- Cs11 (Computer Language Shop), Pass

Winter 2006 *):
- Cs21 (Decidability and Tractability), A+
- Ma1b Analytical Track (Calculus of one and several variables and linear algebra), A, finished 1st in class
- Ph1b Practical Track (Classical Mechanics and Electromagnetism), A+, 1st in class
- Cs2 (Introduction to Programming Methods), A+

Fall 2005 *):
- Cs1 (Introduction to Computation), finished 1st in class, among over 100 students
- Ph1a (Classical mechanics and electromagnetism), 1st in class, among 200 students
- Ma/Cs6a (Introduction to discrete mathematics), A+
- Ma1a (Calculus of one and several variables and linear algebra), A+
 

GPA: 4.1 / 4.0

*) These are shadow grades from Freshman Progress Reports, as freshmen officially receive only P/F grades for their first two terms at Caltech.
 

A bit about me

I am originally from Sibiu, a medieval town in the southern part of Transylvania in Romania somewhere close to Dracula's legendary castle. I enjoy long runs in nature or by Charles river.