From Proofs to Practice: Tackling Challenges of Deploying Modern Cryptography

Speaker: Prof. Xiao WANG
Associate Professor
Computer Science
Northwestern University

Title: From Proofs to Practice: Tackling Challenges of Deploying Modern Cryptography

Date: Thursday, 11 December 2025

Time: 3:00pm - 4:00pm

Venue: Lecture Theater H (Chen Kuan Cheng Forum), near lift 27/28, HKUST

Abstract:

Modern cryptographic protocols are essential for securing information across its entire lifecycle. Despite major theoretical and practical advances, their widespread deployment still faces challenges, particularly in secure multi-party computation, zero-knowledge proofs, and related primitives. These challenges often stem from trade-offs between efficiency, security guarantees, and usability. My research tackles these issues by unifying theoretical insights with practical protocol design and system implementation. In this talk, I will highlight several efforts to bridge this gap, demonstrating how principled cryptographic design can enable both stronger security and broader adoption in practice.

Biography:

Xiao Wang is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University. His research spans practical secure multi-party computation, zero-knowledge proofs, and post-quantum cryptography, with applications to artificial intelligence, formal methods, and health informatics. He was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT and Boston University and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. He received a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, two Best Paper Awards at ACM CCS, a Best Paper Award at ACM CS&LAW, and an ACM CCS Best Paper runner-up. He has also received faculty research awards from Google, JPMorgan, and Meta.