What's keeping two cybersecurity researchers up at night with Srini Devadas and Vinod Vaikuntanathan

Srini Devadas is the Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and has been on the MIT EECS faculty since 1988. He served as Associate Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, with the responsibility for Computer Science, from 2005 to 2011. His research focuses on Computer Aided Design (CAD), computer security and computer architecture. In 2015, he received various awards including: ACM/IEEE A. Richard Newton Technical Impact award in Electronic Design Automation, IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award (2014) for inventing Physical Unclonable Functions and single-chip secure processor architectures.

Industry Impact
Protection of information has been a major challenge since the start of the computer age. Given the widespread adoption of computer technology for business operations, the problem of protecting information has become a more crucial epidemic. Classified computer files, databases, and Internet applications are the most sole and vital asset of an organization. Hence, when these assets become attack, threatened, or damage data integrity becomes questioned and conducting business is at a halt.

Vinod Vaikuntanathan is a Steven and Renee Finn Career Development Assistant Professor of Computer Science at MIT. His main research interest is in the theory and practice of cryptography. He works on lattice-based cryptography, building advanced cryptographic primitives using integer lattices; leakage-resilient cryptography, defining and developing algorithms resilient against adversarial information leakage; and more recently, the theory and practice of computing on encrypted data, constructing powerful cryptographic objects such as fully homomorphic encryption and functional encryption. Vinod obtained his Ph.D. from MIT where he received a 2009 George M. Sprowls Award for the best MIT Ph.D. thesis in Computer Science. He is also a recipient of the 2008 IBM Josef Raviv Postdoctoral Fellowship, the 2013 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2014 Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, and a 2014 NSF CAREER award.