Dr. Pratik Sarkar at Supra - Blockchain and Web3 Research

Dr. Pratik Sarkar

Research Scientist, Cryptography

PhD in Computer Science

Boston University, USA

About

Dr. Sarkar is a Research Scientist in the Cryptography team of Supra Research. Previously, he completed his PhD (2018-23) in Computer Science from Boston University under the supervision of Prof. Ran Canetti, specializing in Secure Computation and Zero-Knowledge. He has previously interned as a Research Scientist intern with the Advanced Cryptography team at VISA Research, where he worked on fundamental questions in post-quantum. He has also interned as a Research Engineer with the Statistics and Privacy team at Meta, where he worked privacy-preserving advertisement technologies.
Prior to embarking on the Ph.D. journey, he completed his Master's degree (2015-18) at the Department of Computer Science at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, under the supervision of Dr. Arpita Patra in the Cryptography and Information Security Lab. He has also received his Bachelor's in Computer Science from IIEST, Shibpur (2011-15).

Interests and expertise

Dr. Sarkar's primary focus is on creating privacy-preserving solutions with high levels of assurance, which can be proven through formal security models and various cryptographic techniques. These techniques may include Secure Computation and Zero-Knowledge, among others.

At Supra, he is working on improving the state-of-the-art primitives used in the blockchain space, mainly Verifiable Randomness Services, Threshold Cryptosystems and Zero-Knowledge.

Recently, he has been also been intrigued by the potential of Applied Cryptography to utilize statistical analysis on client data without compromising their privacy.

Commentary

Secure Computation is a powerful tool that enables mutually distrusting parties to compute a joint function on their private inputs, without compromising the secrecy of their inputs. This enables different applications like privacy-preserving machine learning, private-data sharing among hospitals, private measurement of advertisement effectiveness, etc.

However, general secure computation is expensive in terms of communication and computation. His research focuses on building customized secure computation protocols for different real-world use-cases that are faster in practice.