I am an Assistant Professor in EECS at the University of Michigan. My email address is paulgrub AT umich DOT edu.
If you're interested in working with me, read this before sending an email. I am currently recruiting graduate students.
I use he/him/his pronouns.
Research
My research is in applied cryptography, security, and systems.
In my work, I use a wide array of theoretical and practical tools to
both prevent security failures (e.g., identifying flaws in existing cryptographic primitives, and building new ones)
and reduce the harm failures can cause (e.g., designing new key-value stores that protect data even if they are compromised).
My research interests are broad, but a recurring interest is the interface between cryptographic primitives or protocols and the systems that use them: surprising and subtle things often happen here.
Some of my other interests are censorship, privacy, legal and ethical issues related to information security, and the intersection of technology and society.
Publications
(* = authors contributed equally)
See also: Google Scholar, DBLP
Zero-Knowledge Middleboxes USENIX Security 2022
Paul Grubbs, Arasu Arun, Ye Zhang, Joseph Bonneau, Michael Walfish
Arasu spoke about this paper at the sdns://2021 workshop. Watch his talk here.
Read my guest blog on this work for APNIC here. You can also listen to a podcast about this work.
Pancake: Frequency Smoothing for Encrypted Data Stores USENIX Security 2020 (Distinguished Paper Award)
Paul Grubbs*, Anurag Khandelwal*, Marie-Sarah Lacharité*, Lloyd Brown, Lucy Li, Rachit Agrawal, Thomas Ristenpart
During grad school, I was a teaching assistant for CS 5830 (Cryptography) in Spring 2017 and CS 5435 (Security and Privacy Concepts in the Wild) in Fall 2019.
DARPA SIEVE program, September 2021
Meta Privacy-Enhancing Technologies grant, July 2022
NSF CAREER award, March 2023
Bio
For the 2020-2021 academic year, I was a postdoc at NYU, working with Michael Walfish and Joseph Bonneau as a part of the Pepper project.
I did my PhD in Computer Science department at Cornell University, advised by the inimitable Tom Ristenpart. I spent my first year in gorgeous Ithaca, and the rest of the time at the Cornell Tech campus in NYC. In Spring 2018, I was hosted by Kenny Paterson in a visit to Royal Holloway, University of London, located in scenic Egham, UK.
My graduate studies were supported in part by a 2017 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF). My GRF materials are available on request.
Between undergrad and grad school, I worked for two and a half years at Skyhigh Networks (now McAfee) as a cryptography engineer.
I did my undergrad at Indiana University, where I majored in Math and Computer Science.
When I'm not working, I enjoy watching mysteries and comedies, reading, listening to (and occasionally playing) music, and spending time outside in my hammock. I'm also a licensed amateur radio operator (call sign K8PAG).
