Portrait of Srinath Setty

Srinath Setty

Principal Researcher

About

I am a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research (opens in new tab) with research interests in security, privacy, cryptography, and distributed systems. My recent and ongoing work is focused on securing data and services in the cloud. Specific topics of my recent research include high-speed zero-knowledge proofs and zkSNARKs, folding schemes and recursive arguments, and rollback protection for confidential cloud services. In the past, I have worked on Byzantine consensus, fault-tolerance in cloud services, formal verification of distributed systems and cryptographic libraries, metadata-private communication,  and decentralized identity. I got my Ph.D. in computer science from UT Austin where I was advised by Professor Michael Walfish (opens in new tab). Here (opens in new tab) is a copy of my CV.

At MSR, I have worked with the following excellent students, during their internships and beyond: Arasu Arun (2023), Tianyi Liu (2023), Stella Lau (2022), Aditya Basu (2022), Sudheesh Singanamalla (2021), Abhiram Kothapalli (2021), Ioanna Tzialla (2020), Yunhao Zhang (2020), Sangeeta Chowdhary (2019), Edo Roth (opens in new tab) (2019), Jonathan Bootle (opens in new tab) (2018), Kirill Nikitin (opens in new tab) (2018), Willy R. Vasquez (2018), Rishabh Poddar (2018), Sebastian Angel (opens in new tab) (2017), Tyler Hunt (opens in new tab)(2017), Bernhard Kragl (opens in new tab)(2017), Kevin Sekniqi (opens in new tab)(2017), Soumya Basu (opens in new tab)(2016), Ashay Rane (opens in new tab)(2016), Hao Chen (2015–16), and Chunzhi Su (opens in new tab)(2015).

Publications

  1. Jolt: SNARKs for virtual machines via lookups (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Arasu Arun, Srinath Setty, and Justin Thaler
    Cryptology ePrint 2023/1217, 2023
  2. Unlocking the lookup singularity with Lasso (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Srinath Setty, Justin Thaler, and Riad S. Wahby
    Cryptology ePrint 2023/1216, 2023
  3. Revisiting the Nova proof system on a cycle of elliptic curves (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Wilson Nguyen, Dan Boneh, and Srinath Setty
    Cryptology ePrint 2023/969, (to appear at AFT 2023)
  4. Brakedown: Linear-time and field-agnostic SNARKs for R1CS (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Alexander Golovnev, Jonathan Lee, Srinath Setty, Justin Thaler, and Riad S. Wahby
    CRYPTO 2023
  5. Nimble: Rollback protection for confidential cloud services (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Sebastian Angel, Aditya Basu, Weidong Cui, Trent Jaeger, Stella Lau, Srinath Setty, and Sudheesh Singanamalla
    OSDI 2023
  6. HyperNova: Recursive arguments for customizable constraint systems (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Abhiram Kothapalli and Srinath Setty
    Cryptology ePrint 2023/573, 2023
  7. Customizable constraint systems for succinct arguments (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Srinath Setty, Justin Thaler, and Riad Wahby
    Cryptology ePrint 2023/552, 2023
  8. SuperNova: Proving universal machine executions without universal circuits (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Abhiram Kothapalli and Srinath Setty
    Cryptology ePrint 2022/1758, 2022
  9. Recursive Zero-Knowledge Arguments from Folding Schemes (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Abhiram Kothapalli, Srinath Setty, and Ioanna Tzialla
    CRYPTO 2022
  10. Transparency Dictionaries with Succinct Proofs of Correct Operation
    Ioanna Tzialla, Abhiram Kothapalli, Bryan Parno, and Srinath Setty
    NDSS 2022

    • Full version: Cryptology ePrint 2021/1263
  11. FastVer: Making Data Integrity a Commodity
    Arvind Arasu, Badrish Chandramouli, Johannes Gehrke, Esha Ghosh, Donald Kossmann, Jonathan Protzenko, Ravi Ramamurthy, Tahina Ramananandro, Aseem Rastogi, Srinath Setty, Nikhil Swamy, Alexander van Renen, and Min Xu
    ACM SIGMOD 2021
  12. Byzantine ordered consensus without Byzantine oligarchy (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Yunhao Zhang, Srinath Setty, Qi Chen, Lidong Zhou, and Lorenzo Alvisi
    USENIX OSDI 2020.
    Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award
  13. Quarks: Quadruple-efficient transparent zkSNARKs (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Srinath Setty and Jonathan Lee
    Cryptology ePrint 2020/1275, 2020
  14. Spartan: Efficient and general-purpose zkSNARKs without trusted setup
    Srinath Setty
    IACR CRYPTO 2020. Full version: Cryptology ePrint 2019/550, 2019 (PDF (opens in new tab))
  15. Visor: Privacy-Preserving Video Analytics as a Cloud Service (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Rishabh Poddar, Ganesh Ananthanarayanan, Srinath Setty, Stavros Volos, and Raluca Ada Popa
    USENIX Security 2020
    CSAW 2020 Applied Research Competition Award (Runner-up)
  16. Verifiable state machines: Proofs that untrusted services operate correctly (PDF (opens in new tab), ePrint (opens in new tab))
    Srinath Setty, Sebastian Angel, and Jonathan Lee
    ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review,  Volume 54, Number 1, August 2020
  17. Replicated state machines without replicated execution (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Jonathan Lee, Kirill Nikitin, and Srinath Setty
    IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2020
  18. Veritas: Shared Verifiable Databases and Tables in the Cloud
    Lindsey Allen et al.
    CIDR 2019
  19. Proving the correct execution of concurrent services in zero-knowledge (PDF (opens in new tab), Extended version (opens in new tab))
    Srinath Setty, Sebastian Angel, Trinabh Gupta, and Jonathan Lee
    USENIX OSDI 2018
  20. PIR with compressed queries and amortized query processing (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Sebastian Angel, Hao Chen, Kim Laine, and Srinath Setty
    IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2018
  21. Enabling secure and resource-efficient blockchain networks with VOLT (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Srinath Setty, Soumya Basu, Lidong Zhou, Michael L. Roberts, and Ramarathnam Venkatesan
    Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2017-38, August 2017
  22. Vale: Verifying high-performance cryptographic assembly code (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Barry Bond, Chris Hawblitzel, Manos Kapritsos, K. Rustan M. Leino, Jacob R. Lorch, Bryan Parno, Ashay Rane, Srinath Setty, and Laure Thompson
    USENIX Security 2017
    USENIX Distinguished paper award
  23. IronFleet: Proving safety and liveness of practical distributed systems (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Chris Hawblitzel, Jon Howell, Manos Kapritsos, Jacob R. Lorch, Bryan Parno, Michael L. Roberts, Srinath Setty, and Brian Zill
    CACM Research Highlights 60(7), July 2017.
  24. Realizing the fault-tolerance promise of cloud storage using locks with intent (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Srinath Setty, Chunzhi Su, Jacob R. Lorch, Lidong Zhou, Hao Chen, Parveen Patel, and Jinglei Ren
    USENIX OSDI 2016
  25. Unobservable communication over fully untrusted infrastructure (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Sebastian Angel and Srinath Setty
    USENIX OSDI 2016
  26. Scalable and private media consumption with Popcorn (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Trinabh Gupta, Natacha Crooks, Whitney Mulhern, Srinath Setty, Lorenzo Alvisi, and Michael Walfish
    USENIX NSDI 2016
  27. IronFleet: Proving Practical Distributed Systems Correct (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Chris Hawblitzel, Jon Howell, Manos Kapritsos, Jacob R. Lorch, Bryan Parno, Michael L. Roberts, Srinath Setty, and Brian Zill
    ACM SOSP 2015
  28. Efficient RAM and control flow in verifiable outsourced computation (PDF (opens in new tab), Full version (opens in new tab))
    Riad S. Wahby, Srinath Setty, Zuocheng Ren, Andrew J. Blumberg, and Michael Walfish
    NDSS 2015
  29. Toward practical argument systems for verifiable computation (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Srinath Setty, Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, December 2014
    University of Texas Bert Kay Best Dissertation Award
  30. Verifying computations with state (PDF (opens in new tab), Full version (opens in new tab), Talk (opens in new tab))
    Benjamin Braun, Ariel J. Feldman, Zuocheng Ren, Srinath Setty, Andrew J. Blumberg, and Michael Walfish
    ACM SOSP 2013
  31. A hybrid architecture for interactive verifiable computation (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Victor Vu, Srinath Setty, Andrew J. Blumberg, and Michael Walfish
    IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2013
  32. Resolving the conflict between generality and plausibility in verified computation (PDF (opens in new tab), Full version (opens in new tab), Talk (opens in new tab))
    Srinath Setty, Benjamin Braun, Victor Vu, Andrew J. Blumberg, Bryan Parno, and Michael Walfish
    ACM EuroSys 2013
  33. Taking proof-based verified computation a few steps closer to practicality (PDF (opens in new tab), Full version (opens in new tab), Talk (opens in new tab))
    Srinath Setty, Victor Vu, Nikhil Panpalia, Benjamin Braun, Andrew J. Blumberg, and Michael Walfish
    USENIX Security 2012
  34. Making argument systems for outsourced computation practical (sometimes) (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Srinath Setty, Richard McPherson, Andrew J. Blumberg, and Michael Walfish
    NDSS 2012
  35. Depot: Cloud Storage with Minimal Trust (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Prince Mahajan, Srinath Setty, Sangmin Lee, Allen Clement, Lorenzo Alvisi, Mike Dahlin, and Michael Walfish
    ACM TOCS Volume 29, Number 4, Article 12, December 2011
  36. Toward practical and unconditional verification of remote computations (PDF (opens in new tab), Talk (opens in new tab))
    Srinath Setty, Andrew J. Blumberg, and Michael Walfish
    USENIX HotOS 2011
  37. Repair from a chair: Computer repair as an untrusted cloud service (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Lon Ingram, Ivaylo Popov, Srinath Setty, and Michael Walfish
    USENIX HotOS 2011
  38. Depot: Cloud Storage with Minimal Trust (PDF (opens in new tab), Full version (opens in new tab))
    Prince Mahajan, Srinath Setty, Sangmin Lee, Allen Clement, Lorenzo Alvisi, Mike Dahlin, and Michael Walfish
    USENIX OSDI 2010
  39. Airavat: Security and Privacy for MapReduce (PDF (opens in new tab))
    Indrajit Roy, Srinath Setty, Ann Kilzer, Vitaly Shmatikov, and Emmett Witchel
    USENIX NSDI 2010