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Brown CS PhD alum Evgenios Kornaropoulos has just received an National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, the most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty in science and engineering. He is currently an assistant professor at the Computer Science Department at George Mason University and completed his graduate studies at Brown under the mentorship of Professor Roberto Tamassia.

Evgenios’s research focuses on security and privacy, specifically how information leaks during encrypted computations and how these leaks can be controlled to ensure privacy while maintaining efficiency. His project examines how accessing encrypted data in the cloud can reveal small patterns over time, which may allow a cloud provider to infer information about the underlying plaintext. 

The research explores key questions, including how many pieces of leaked information are needed to uncover patterns, how different queries influence these relationships, and how inferential power changes with query modifications. The goal is to develop provable guarantees that limit an observer’s ability to reconstruct sensitive data while allowing encrypted computation to scale.

"My initial ideas in this field took shape in the halls of the CIT during my time as a graduate student at Brown," Evgenios says. "This research takes a bold step towards taming cryptographic leakage and using it to build scalable defenses for encrypted computation with provable guarantees of inapproximability."

Evgenios’s research group at George Mason University focuses on aligning security and privacy with real-world computational demands. In addition to cryptographic leakage, his group explores the intersection of privacy with machine learning and AI applications. Evgenios joins multiple previous Brown CS winners of the award, including (most recently) Peihan Miao, Vasileios Kemerlis, Srinath Sridhar, Malte Schwarzkopf, Daniel Ritchie, and George Konidaris.

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.