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Cryptography and Privacy Research

The Cryptography and Privacy Research Group studies privacy problems in real-world systems and creates practical solutions using modern cryptography and privacy technologies.

Our objectives

  • We conduct fundamental research in privacy and cryptography. Almost all of our research is public, and we regularly publish in top conferences in the field. We also collaborate with researchers and students in academia and host several interns every year through Microsoft’s internship program.

  • We design and analyze privacy systems for Microsoft product groups. Sometimes this means providing consultation, but at other times we may end up designing entirely new protocols, addressing new kinds of performance and scalability issues, and building missing tools or libraries.

  • Machine learning pipelines leak information about the training data. We explore new attacks and mitigation strategies in real-world scenarios, with the ultimate goal of being able to quantify this leakage and provide practical threat models.

  • We aim to build production-quality libraries and release them under permissive open-source licenses (typically MIT). We believe modern privacy technologies should be broadly available to enable every developer deliver on exactly the privacy guarantees they want.

  • We believe modern privacy technologies can not only provide regulatory compliance, but also enable new data collaborations across distrusting parties, enable better insights by tearing down data silos, and enable new business opportunities that would otherwise be impossible or require costly legal procedures.

Colloquium

We regularly invite researchers from around the world to visit either in person, or virtually, to speak at the Cryptography and Privacy Colloquium. These are great opportunities for learning, sharing, and networking. Please let us know if you would be interested in presenting.