abhi shelat

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Cryptography, security, and game theory.

abhi shelat completed his Ph.D. at MIT in 2005 under Professor Silvio Micali. He then worked at the IBM Zurich Research Lab as a Research Staff Member until 2007 when he joined the UVa Department of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor. He was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship while he was a graduate student.

shelat's research focuses on the modern study of cryptography. He investigates techniques for facilitating interactions between distrustful entities (e.g., automated tellers, wireless networks, internet banking, satellite radio/TV, etc). He emphasizes rigorous methods in combination with precise yet practical definitions and assumptions. Recent works considers topics such as exploiting imperfect reference strings, efficient access to untrusted shared memory, adaptive oblivious transfer, obfuscation, non-interactive and fair zero-knowledge proofs, collusion-free protocols, digital fingerprinting, and data compression.

• Cryptography from Sunspots: How to use an Imperfect Reference String R. Canetti, R. Pass, and a. shelat, Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS'07), Providence, Rhode Island, 2007.
• Efficient Fork-Linearizable Access to Untrusted Shared Memory, C. Cachin, a. shelat, and A. Shraer, Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC'07), Portland, Oregan, 2007.
• Simulatable Adaptive Oblivious Transfer, J. Camenisch, G. Neven, and a. shelat, EUROCRYPT 2007, Barcelona, Spain, 2007, pp. 573-590.
• Securely Obfuscating Re-encryption, S. Hohenberger, G. Rothblum, a. shelat, and V. Vaikuntanathan, Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC'07), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2007, pp. 233-252.
• Construction of a Non-malleable Encryption Scheme from Any Semantically-Secure One, R. Pass, a. shelat, and V. Vaikuntanathan, CRYPTO'06, Santa Barbara, CA, 2006, pp. 271-289.