I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Duke University. I spent the past year as a postdoctoral researcher at VMware Research. Before that, I graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park under the supervision of Professor Jonathan Katz and Professor Elaine Shi. I am a recipient of the 2016 Google Ph.D. fellowship in Security. I work in the area of security, applied cryptography, distributed computing and blockchains.

Teaching

Fall 2019: Consensus Protocols in Distributed Computing and Blockchains (CompSci 590-04)

Publications and Tech Reports

(* denotes author names in alphabetical order)

Flexible Byzantine Fault Tolerance *
Accepted in ACM CCS, 2019
Paper | Blog post
Dahlia Malkhi, Kartik Nayak, and Ling Ren

Sync HotStuff: Simple and Practical State Machine Replication *
Paper
Ittai Abraham, Dahlia Malkhi, Kartik Nayak, Ling Ren, and Maofan Yin

Communication Complexity of Byzantine Agreement, Revisited *
Paper
Published in PODC, 2019
Ittai Abraham, T-H. Hubert Chan, Danny Dolev, Kartik Nayak, Rafael Pass, Ling Ren, and Elaine Shi

Dfinity Consensus, Explored [TechReport] *
Paper
Ittai Abraham, Dahlia Malkhi, Kartik Nayak, and Ling Ren

OptORAMa: Optimal Oblivious RAM *
Paper
Gilad Asharov, Ilan Komargodski, Wei-Kai Lin, Kartik Nayak, Enoch Peserico, and Elaine Shi

Locality-Preserving Oblivious RAM *
Paper
Accepted in Eurocrypt, 2019
Gilad Asharov, T-H. Hubert Chan, Kartik Nayak, Rafael Pass, Ling Ren, and Elaine Shi

Synchronous Byzantine Agreement with Expected Rounds, Expected Communication, and Optimal Resilience *
Paper | Older Version
Published in Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC), 2019
Ittai Abraham, Srinivas Devadas, Danny Dolev, Kartik Nayak, and Ling Ren

More is Less: Perfectly Secure Oblivious Algorithms in the Multi-Server Setting *
Paper
Published in Asiacrypt, 2018
T-H. Hubert Chan, Jonathan Katz, Kartik Nayak, Antigoni Polychroniadou, and Elaine Shi

Perfectly Secure Oblivious Parallel RAM *
Paper
Published in Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC), 2018
T-H. Hubert Chan, Kartik Nayak, and Elaine Shi

Solida: A Blockchain Protocol Based on Reconfigurable Byzantine Consensus *
Paper
Published in Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS), 2017
Ittai Abraham, Dahlia Malkhi, Kartik Nayak, Ling Ren, and Alexander Spiegelman

Asymptotically Tight Bounds for Composing ORAM with PIR *
Paper
Published in Public Key Cryptography (PKC), 2017
Ittai Abraham, Christopher W. Fletcher, Kartik Nayak, Benny Pinkas, and Ling Ren

HOP: Hardware makes Obfuscation Practical
Paper | Code | Slides | Videos
Published in Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS), 2017
Kartik Nayak, Christopher W. Fletcher, Ling Ren, Nishanth Chandran, Satya Lokam, Elaine Shi, and Vipul Goyal

Stubborn Mining: Generalizing Selfish Mining and Combining with an Eclipse Attack
Paper | Code | Slides
Published in IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (Euro S&P), 2016
Kartik Nayak, Srijan Kumar, Andrew Miller, and Elaine Shi

GraphSC: Parallel Secure Computation Made Easy
Paper | Code | Slides | Video
Published in IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2015
Kartik Nayak, Xiao Shaun Wang, Stratis Ioannidis, Udi Weinsberg, Nina Taft, and Elaine Shi

ObliVM: A Programming Framework for Secure Computation
Paper | Code
Published in IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2015
1st place in NYU-Poly CSAW Applied Security Research Best Paper Competition
Chang Liu, Xiao Shaun Wang, Kartik Nayak, Yan Huang, and Elaine Shi

Oblivious Data Structures
Paper | Slides
Published in ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2014
Finalist in NYU-Poly CSAW Applied Security Research Best Paper Competition
Xiao Shaun Wang, Kartik Nayak, Chang Liu, T-H Hubert Chan, Elaine Shi, Emil Stefanov, and Yan Huang

An Oblivious Parallel RAM with Parallel Runtime Blowup [TechReport]
Paper
Kartik Nayak, Jonathan Katz

Some Vulnerabilities are Different than Others: Studying Vulnerabilities and Attack Surfaces in the Wild
Paper | Announcement | Slides | Video
Published in Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID), 2014
Kartik Nayak, Daniel Marino, Petros Efstathopoulos, and Tudor Dumitras

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science, University Of Maryland, College Park, September 2013 - June 2018
  

• M.S., Computer Science, University Of Maryland, College Park, September 2013 - December 2016
  

• B.Tech., Computer Science, Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute, Mumbai, July 2007 - May 2011

Work Experience

Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK, June - August 2017
Worked on scalable and confidential blockchains (Coco)
Mentors: Manuel Costa, Olya Ohrimenko

VMware Research, Palo Alto, June - August 2016
Worked on blockchains and Oblivious RAMs
Mentors: Ittai Abraham, Dahlia Malkhi, Benny Pinkas

Microsoft Research, Bangalore, India, June - August 2015
Worked towards designing a secure processor to achieve VBB obfuscation of RAM programs
Mentors: Vipul Goyal, Satya Lokam, Nishanth Chandran

Technicolor Research, Los Altos, June - August 2014
Worked towards parallel secure computation frame work for graph parallel algorithms
Mentors: Stratis Ioannidis, Udi Weinsberg, Nina Taft

Google India, Bangalore, July 2011 - June 2013
Worked towards reducing spam from Google Apps for business