Harikesh Kailad – Sparrell Family Undergraduate Scholar
1st Year Scholar, Undergraduate

Computer Science and Mathematics
University of Maryland

Research:
My cryptography work focuses on the development of anonymous credentials and the creation of anonymous forums with moderation, and their use for whistleblowing, credit scores, private messaging, and ad fraud detection.

How Will Your Research Benefit Society?
I am currently interested in bringing anonymity and privacy to the web by using and improving privacy enhancing technologies, and my primary goal is to accelerate the development of zero knowledge proofs, anonymous systems, and multiparty computation. The development of these privacy enhancing technologies can revolutionize the internet and offer data protection and privacy while enabling trustless collaboration. The applications of this technology are vast – they include trustless cryptocurrency and finance, private anonymous tokens, anonymous forums with moderation, anonymous ad fraud detection, verifiable computation, compute on private data, and more. 

I hope to improve the efficiency of modern privacy enhancing technology such as zero-knowledge proofs, post quantum cryptography, and multiparty computation. I hope that with these efficient constructions, internet users around the world will be able to perform computation, finance, and communication more privately, securely, and ensuring trustless computation. I hope that my research will help accelerate modern cryptographic constructions to the forefront and allow them to be deployed in practice, giving users more freedom and protecting their privacy.

How will an ARCS Award Benefit Your Research?
By funding my research over the summer and allowing me to attend summer workshops on cryptography, the ARCS award will help me not only focus solely on my research, but also allow me to learn more from experts in the field. With the ARCS award, I will be able to focus on research instead of additionally working to make ends meet. Further, this money will allow me to attend the Simons Institute Proof Systems workshop, which will allow me to develop and learn from experts on zero-knowledge proofs.

Career objectives:
My objective is to obtain a Ph.D. in computer science and math. I hope to conduct research in both applied and theoretical cryptography and theoretical computer science, and teach others about cryptography at the university level.