Raluca Ada Popa

    Undergraduate, M.I.T., Class of 2009

    Majors: Computer Science and Mathematics

    Email: ralucap AT mit DOT edu,

              raluca AT csail DOT mit DOT edu

I am an undergraduate in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My research advisors are Professor Barbara Liskov and Professor Ronald L. Rivest. My academic advisor is Professor M. Frans Kaashoek. I attended Caltech my freshman year and transferred to MIT beginning with my sophomore year.

Classes  |  Research  |  Publications  |  Talks  |  Awards  |  C.V. | About Me

Research

I am interested in a variety of topics in systems security. I love to apply theory, such as cryptography, to systems.  Most recently, I became very interested in cloud security. Here is a description of the projects I worked on in reverse chronological order:

Cloud Security.  I have been working in secure cloud storage with MSR Redmond, mentors Helen J. Wang and Jay Lorch. Most cloud storage systems are not secure (i.e., they do not guarantee confidentiality and integrity of data as well as some desirable consistency and freshness properties); we are working on ensuring that cloud systems provide such security properties as well as enabling them in cloud SLAs.

Mobile Systems's Privacy. Currently, I am working in CSAIL, MIT as a member of the NMS group. I am doing research with Professor Hari Balakrishnan in protecting driver privacy in a world where location-based vehicular services are becoming popular. Such services include usage- or congestion-based road pricing, traffic law enforcement, traffic monitoring, "pay-as-you-go" insurance, and vehicle safety systems. Our project starts with the observation that these services involve computing functions over location-time driver paths. The challenge is to compute such functions without knowing the path of the driver. The idea is to use secure multi-party computation according to which a computation can proceed correctly without revealing the private data of the parties involved.

Electronic Voting. In parallel, I am working on a more theoretical project with Professor Ronald L. Rivest in electronic voting. We apply theoretical computer science and mathematics (such as combinatorics, probability, game theory, and algorithms) to electronic voting. We are trying to come up with auditing algorithms and procedures to ensure that the result of an election is correct and not changed by any fraud.  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. Our current work is to design procedures for escalating the audit of an election, if certain accidental discrepancies were found in the first audit. Check out our published work for details.

Byzantine Fault Tolerant Systems. I have also been working in the PMG group with Professor Barbara Liskov in Byzantine Fault Tolerant systems. My project was to design and implement a Byzantine fault tolerant cooperative caching system. How can one get the benefits of a cooperative caching scheme in the presence of malicious/faulty clients? 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.

Software Bugs. During Summer 2006, before transferring to MIT, I did research with Professor Yuanyuan Zhou from the Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Opera research group. My internship was sponsored by the CRA - Women Distributed Mentor Project Award for Summer Research.  I worked in concurrency bug detection in operating systems code. Our tool (happily or not?) found quite a few bugs in Linux and Mozilla... check out our published work!

Publications

• Raluca Ada Popa, joint work with: Helen J. Wang, Jay Lorch, David Molnar, and Li Zhuang.

           Enabling Security in Cloud SLAs: A Secure and Practical Cloud Storage System. In preparation for the 2010 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland'10).

• Raluca Ada Popa, joing work with: Andrew J. Blumberg and Hari Balakrishnan.

           Preserving Privacy While Computing Aggregate Statistics for Mobile Systems. In preparation for the 2010 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy  (Oakland'10).

• Raluca Ada Popa, Hari Balakrishnan, and Andrew J. Blumberg.

            Protecting Privacy in Location-Based Vehicular Services. In the proceedings of the 18th USENIX Security Symposium, (USENIX SEC'09).

• Raluca Ada Popa, Alessandro Chiesa, Tural Badirkhanli, and Muriel Medard.

           Going Beyond Pollution Attacks: Forcing Byzantine Clients to Code Correctly. In submission at the 2010 IEEE Infocomm conference (Infocomm'10).

• James Cowling, Dan Ports, Barbara Liskov, Raluca Ada Popa, and Abhijeet Gaikwad.

           Census: Location-Aware Membership Management for Large-Scale Distributed Systems. In the proceedings of the 2009 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, (USENIX'09).

• Javed A. Aslam, Raluca Ada Popa, and Ronald L. Rivest.

   

  On Estimating the Size and Confidence of a Statistical Audit. In the Proceedings of the 2007 USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop (EVT'07) held in conjunction with the 16th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2007.

• Javed A. Aslam, Raluca Ada Popa, and Ronald L. Rivest.

   

  On Auditing Elections When Precincts Have Different  Sizes. In the Proceedings of the 2008 USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop (EVT'08), 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. In the Proceedings of the 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'07), October 2007.

   

   

   

Talks

• VPriv: Protecting Privacy in Location-Based Vehicular Services.

  Talk at the 18th USENIX Security Symposium, Montreal, Canada, (USENIX'09).

• Protecting Privacy in Location-Based Vehicular Services.

  Invited talk ath University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Security Seminar, 11/2008.

• 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.

• 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.

• Byzantine Fault Tolerant Cooperative Caching.

  Talk presented at the 3rd CSAIL Student Workshop,  MIT (CSW 2007), September 2007.

Awards

Senior Year at MIT:

- 2009 Jacobs Presidential Fellowship for graduate studies,

- 2009 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award for research, Female Winner

- 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

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

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.
 

I am originally from Sibiu, a medieval town in the southern part of Transylvania in Romania somewhere close to Dracula's legendary castle. In 2007, Sibiu was the Cultural Capital of Europe!