Omkant Pandey
Stony Brook University, NY·Computer Science·Early-career
Encryption keeps data private by relying on math problems that ordinary computers cannot solve in reasonable time. Quantum computers change that calculus twice over: they break some of those problems, and they also give attackers new abilities, such as holding information in superposition or rewinding a protocol in ways classical attackers cannot.
- Fields
Computer Science
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
cryptography
quantum adversaries
secure computation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Construct secure multi-party computation protocols that remain secure when many sessions run concurrently and the adversary is a quantum computer, closing open questions in post-quantum secure computation.
- Build non-malleable commitment and zero-knowledge protocols secure against quantum attackers, to defend against man-in-the-middle adversaries who relay and tamper with messages across sessions.
- Develop concurrent zero-knowledge proof systems for the quantum setting, where a prover convinces a verifier of a statement's truth without revealing anything else even under coordinated simultaneous attacks.
- Establish foundational techniques such as super-polynomial simulation under polynomial hardness and universally composable security for quantum adversaries, providing reusable post-quantum cryptographic building blocks.
More about the research
Cryptography therefore needs to be rebuilt on foundations that survive quantum attack. This project focuses on secure computation, protocols that let several parties compute a joint result, such as a combined statistic or an auction outcome, without revealing their private inputs, and asks how to keep such protocols secure against quantum adversaries.
Why it matters
If large quantum computers arrive, protocols protecting financial transactions, medical data sharing and private joint computation could fail, including ones that look secure today but break when many sessions run at once. Developing post-quantum building blocks such as non-malleable commitments and composable zero-knowledge proofs could give designers of future privacy systems primitives with security arguments that hold against quantum attackers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jason LeGrow
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Computer Science
Construct post-quantum blind signatures, threshold signatures and multisignatures based on lattices, error-correcting codes and group actions such as isogenies, maps between elliptic curves.
David Wu
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Computer Science·Early-career
Construct functional encryption schemes such as attribute-based and broadcast encryption in a registration-based model, where an untrusted, transparent key aggregator combines user-registered public keys into one short key.
Frauke Bleher
University of Iowa, IA·Mathematics & Statistics
Improve explicit constructions of infinite families of number fields with small root discriminants, using Galois cohomology, explicit Chebotarev theorems and p-adic and modular-form methods related to Hilbert's 12th problem.
The school
Stony Brook University: 32 labs on PI Pages, $319M a year on research, 289 research doctorates a year.
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