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I am a Ph.D. student at The University of Texas at Austin in the SPARK Research Lab advised by Prof. Mohit Tiwari. My interests lie in privacy, cryptosystems, formal methods, outreach, and entrepreneurship.

Most recently I was an M.Eng. student at the MIT Media Lab's Digital Currency Initiative advised by Dr. Neha Narula. My thesis was on the privacy and auditability of distributed ledgers, and part of it was later published at NSDI. You can read my thesis here.

I also did my undergrad at MIT where I lived in Spanish House and had research opportunities on combining attribute-based encryption with proof-of-work under Prof. Shafi Goldwasser, and on optimizing SMT solvers with program synthesis under Prof. Armando Solar-Lezama.

I have worked full time at Raytheon BBN Technologies, and interned at Samsung Austin R&D Center (SARC) (S19), Microsoft Research (S18), Symantec (S13, S14), Secunetics (IAP14), and Lockheed Martin (S12).

I am a 2019-2020 Strauss Center Brumley Next Generation Fellow mentored by Prof. Bobby Chesney working on cybersecurity law and policy.

Publications

Narula, N., Vasquez, W., and M. Virza. Privacy-preserving Auditing on Distributed Ledgers. In NSDI. Renton, Washington, 2018. [link]

Recent Adventures

I attended Real World Crypto '19. Write up of my experience.

I attended NSDI '18.

I attended Real World Crypto '18.

I attended the DeepSpec Summer School '17 where I participated in the Coq Intensive and learned about formally verified systems

I attended PLMW@POPL '17 in Paris!

I attended Real World Crypto '17. It was awesome! Write up of my experience.

I participated in the 2014 Battelle CyberAuto Challenge

Projects/Activites

Security

FyreBox - Encrypted File System

Bulletproofs Implementation in Go

Outreach

I was Vice President of the MAES Boston Professional Chapter.

Steganography Challenge for High Schoolers

Consejera: A platform for parents to help their children succeed

Entrepreneurship

MIT ECCSF Winter 2015: Latinos in Entrepreneurship Conference

Other

I am co-founder of GraduatE ECE (GREECE) @ UT whose mission is to interact with ECE graduate students across labs and tracks and foster a sense of community within the UT Graduate ECE department. We host social events, industry events, and provide a voice to the administration on behalf of students' needs.

I am an MIT Arts Scholar interested in visualizing privacy leakages in everyday interactions, and exploring ways to visualize binary executions to get insights, similar to ..cantor.dust.. or DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge.

More to come...