Raluca Ada Popa

   Ph.D. Candidate

   Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT

   32 Vassar St., 32-G982

   Cambridge, MA 02139

   

    Email: ralucap AT mit DOT edu,

               raluca AT csail DOT mit DOT edu

 

 

 

 

I am a second year Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I also earned my Masters of Engineering in Computer Science and my Bachelors in Computer Science and in Mathematics from MIT. 


I am interested in security, systems, and cryptography. In particular, I like to build secure systems that have a solid theoretical foundation.


My research advisor is Professor Nickolai Zeldovich and I also work with Professor Hari Balakrishnan. In my undergraduate, I also worked for two years with Professor Barbara Liskov and Professor Ronald L. Rivest.




Check out our security seminar/discussion group!




 

Classes  |  Research  |  Publications  |  Talks  |  Awards  |  C.V. | About Me

 

Research

I am interested in security and, in particular, I like the combination of systems and cryptography. I believe a secure system should have a solid theoretical foundation.

Here is a description of my projects (including projects from my undergraduate years):

CryptDB.  Together with Prof. Nickolai Zeldovich and Prof. Hari Balakrishnan, we designed CryptDB, an encrypted database that enables relational query processing on encrypted data. CryptDB provides provable and practical privacy in the face of a compromised database server (e.g., when the database is outsourced to the cloud) or curious database administrators in a local data center, while allowing a database server or administrator to execute allowed queries on the encrypted data.

Oblivious Storage with Professor David Mazières and Dan Boneh at Stanford University. Our goal is to provide strict confidentiality for data outsourced on an untrusted server, by hiding any information about the data including user access patterns to it.

Location Privacy for Mobile Systems, with Professor Hari Balakrishnan, in the Networks and Mobile Systems group,  NMS, MIT. I worked on protecting the privacy of drivers or peers in a social network, while enabling interesting location-based applications.  Our first project, VPriv, enables application servers to compute functions on the paths of drivers (e.g., total tolls for path in a month) without learning the path of the drivers.  Our second project, PrivStats,  aimed at preserving privacy while accurately computing aggregate statistics over private data of drivers or peers in a social network (e.g. average ratings of locations).

Cloud Storage Security.  I worked in secure cloud storage with mentors Helen J. Wang and Jay Lorch during my internship at Microsoft Research, Redmond. Most cloud storage systems are not secure (i.e., they do not guarantee confidentiality and integrity of data as well as some desirable consistency and freshness properties); we are working on ensuring that cloud systems provide such security properties as well as enabling them in cloud SLAs.


Electronic Voting. In parallel, I was working on a more theoretical project with Professor Ronald L. Rivest in electronic voting. We apply theoretical computer science and mathematics (such as combinatorics, probability, game theory, and algorithms) to electronic voting. We are trying to come up with auditing algorithms and procedures to ensure that the result of an election is correct and not changed by any fraud.  Our first project provided estimates of the number of precincts or votes that need to be sampled in order to achieve a desired level of confidence that the election result is correct. Our second project was proposing more efficient auditing procedures than the ones in the literature by taking advantage of the observation that precincts have different sizes and thus may represent different benefits to an adversary. Our current work is to design procedures for escalating the audit of an election, if certain accidental discrepancies were found in the first audit. Check out our published work for details.

 

Byzantine Fault Tolerant Systems. I worked in the PMG group with Professor Barbara Liskov in Byzantine Fault Tolerant systems. My project was to design and implement a Byzantine fault tolerant cooperative caching system. How can one get the benefits of a cooperative caching scheme in the presence of malicious/faulty clients? I also worked on a second system, Census, whose goal was to build a very scalable consistent membership service that is resilient to fail-stop and Byzantine clients.

 

Software Bugs. During summer 2006, before transferring to MIT, I did research with Professor Yuanyuan Zhou from the Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Opera research group. My internship was sponsored by the CRA - Women Distributed Mentor Project Award for Summer Research.  I worked in concurrency bug detection in operating systems code. Our tool (happily or not?) found quite a few bugs in Linux and Mozilla... check out our published work!

 

Publications

Papers:
In submission/preparation:


Talks

 


Awards

Graduate School:

- 2011 Google Ph.D. Fellowship for Secure Cloud Computing

- 2010 Charles and Jennifer Johnson award for best CS Masters of Engineering thesis

- 2010 Morris Joseph Levin Award for best MasterWorks presentation

- 2009 MIT Jacobs Presidential Fellowship for graduate studies

Senior Year at MIT:

- 2009 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award for research, Female Winner, Nationwide

- 2009 MIT CSAIL Pogosyants Award for Undergraduate Research

Junior Year at MIT:

-  2008 Google Anita Borg Scholarship, Winner

- 2008 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award, Runner Up, Female Award (Fall 2007)

Sophomore Year at MIT:

- Letter of Recognition for 6.002 ("Circuits and Electronics") (Fall 2006) - top student in the class (~ 200 students)

- Best Game Award and George C. Newton Outstanding Undergraduate Laboratory Project Prize, Third Place - for the final project in 6.170 ("Laboratory in Software Engineering") (Spring 2007)

 

- Letter of Recognition for 6.004 ("Computation Structures") (Fall 2006)

Freshman Year at Caltech

- Caltech Upper Class Merit Award, Carnation Scholarship

- CRA - Women Distributed Mentor Project Award for Summer Research

High school ("Gheorghe Lazar" National College) in Sibiu, Romania

- Graduating as Valedictorian

  

Academic Courses

 

Here is a list of only the relevant science classes I took (humanities and other unrelated classes are not included).



Graduate school:


- 6.897 ("Cloud Computing"), A, Prof. Hari Balakrishnan
- 6.889 ("New Developments in Cryptography"), A, Prof. Shafi Goldwasser

- 6.845 ("Quantum Complexity Theory"), A+, Prof. Scott Aaronson

- 6.867 ("Machine Learning"), A, Prof. Tommi Jaakkola


GPA: 5.0/5.0


Senior year at MIT:

 

Spring 2009:

 

- 6.857 ("Computer and Networks Security"), A+, Prof. Ronald L. Rivest

- 6.989 ("Network Coding"), A, Prof. Muriel Medard

- 8.282 ("Introduction to Astronomy"), A+, Prof. Max Tegmark

- 18.443 ("Statistics for Applications"), A, Prof. R. M. Dudley 

 

Fall 2008:

 

- 6.854 ("Advanced Algorithms"), A+, Prof. Michel X. Goemans

- 6.830 ("Database Systems"), A, Prof. Samuel Madden

- 6.UAP ("Thesis"), A+, Prof. Hari Balakrishnan

 

Junior year at MIT:

 

Spring 2008:

 

- 6.829 (Graduate Level,  "Computer Networks"), A, Prof. Hari Balakrishnan

- 6.875 (Graduate Level, "Cryptography and Cryptanalysis"), A, Prof. Silvio Micali

- 6.003 ("Signals and Processing"), A, Prof. Qing Hu

- 6.UAT ("Preparation for Undergraduate Advanced Project"- presentations class), A+, Prof. Tony Eng

 

Fall 2007:

 

- 6.824 (Graduate level, "Distributed Systems"), A, Prof. Frans Kaashoek

- 6.828 (Graduate level, "Operating System Engineering"),  A, Prof. Robert Morris

- 18.821 ("Project Laboratory in Mathematics"), A, Prof. David Vogan

 

Sophomore year at MIT:

 

Spring 2007:
- 6.170 ("Laboratory in Software Engineering"), A+, Best Game Award, Prof. Saman Amarasinghe, Prof. Michael D. Ernst
- 18.440 ("Probability and Random Variables"), A+,  Prof. Shan-Yuan Ho

- 6.033 ("Computer Systems Engineering"), A, Prof. M. Frans Kaashoek, Prof. Barbara Liskov

Fall 2006:
- 6.002 (Circuits and Electronics), A+, Finished 1st in class, Prof. Jesus A. del Alamo
- 6.004 (Computation Structures), A, Awarded letter of recognition, Prof. Srini Devadas and Prof. Steve Ward
- 6.034 (Artificial Intelligence), A, Prof. Patrick H. Winston
- 18.03 (Differential Equations), A+, Prof. Alar Toomre

 

GPA: 5.0/5.0

Freshman at Caltech:


Spring 2006:
- Cs38 (Introduction to Algorithms), A
- Ma1c Analytical Track (Calculus of one and several variables and linear algebra), A+
- Ph1c Practical Track (Classical Mechanics and Electromagnetism), A+
- Cs11 (Computer Language Shop), Pass

Winter 2006 *):
- Cs21 (Decidability and Tractability), A+
- Ma1b Analytical Track (Calculus of one and several variables and linear algebra), A, finished 1st in class
- Ph1b Practical Track (Classical Mechanics and Electromagnetism), A+, 1st in class
- Cs2 (Introduction to Programming Methods), A+

Fall 2005 *):
- Cs1 (Introduction to Computation), finished 1st in class, among over 100 students
- Ph1a (Classical mechanics and electromagnetism), 1st in class, among 200 students
- Ma/Cs6a (Introduction to discrete mathematics), A+
- Ma1a (Calculus of one and several variables and linear algebra), A+
 

GPA: 4.1 / 4.0


*) These are shadow grades from Freshman Progress Reports, as freshmen officially receive only P/F grades for their first two terms at Caltech.
 

 

 

 About Me

I am originally from Sibiu, a medieval town in the southern part of Transylvania in Romania somewhere close to Dracula's legendary castle. In 2007, Sibiu was the Cultural Capital of Europe!