Kartik Nayak
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Assistant Professor, D340, Levine Research Science Building, |
I work in the area of security, applied cryptography, distributed computing and blockchains.
Before joining Duke University, I spent a 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 am looking for Ph.D. students. If you are interested in working in security, applied cryptography and/or blockchains, please fill this form and drop me an email.
Teaching
Spring 2021: Applied Cryptography (CompSci 590-03)
Fall 2020: Computer Security (CompSci 351-01/02)
Fall 2019: Consensus Protocols in Distributed Computing and Blockchains (CompSci 590-04)
Manuscripts and Publications
(* denotes author names in alphabetical order)
On the Optimality of Optimistic Responsiveness *
Paper
Ittai Abraham, Kartik Nayak, Ling Ren, and Nibesh Shrestha
Perfectly Secure Oblivious Parallel RAM with 
Overhead *
Paper
T-H. Hubert Chan, Wei-Kai Lin, Kartik Nayak, and Elaine Shi
Optimal Good-case Latency for Byzantine Broadcast and State Machine Replication *
Brief Announcement, International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), 2020
Paper
Ittai Abraham, Kartik Nayak, Ling Ren, and Zhuolun Xiang
Improved Extension Protocols for Byzantine Broadcast and Agreement *
Accepted in International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), 2020
Paper
Kartik Nayak, Ling Ren, Elaine Shi, Nitin H. Vaidya, and Zhuolun Xiang
OptORAMa: Optimal Oblivious RAM *
Published in Eurocrypt, 2020
Paper
Gilad Asharov, Ilan Komargodski, Wei-Kai Lin, Kartik Nayak, Enoch Peserico, and Elaine Shi
Sync HotStuff: Simple and Practical State Machine Replication *
Published in IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2020
Paper | Code | Blog post | Short video
Ittai Abraham, Dahlia Malkhi, Kartik Nayak, Ling Ren, and Maofan Yin
Bucket Sort: A Simple Oblivious Sort *
Published in Symposium on Simplicity in Algorithms (SOSA), 2020
Paper
Gilad Asharov, T-H. Hubert Chan, Kartik Nayak, Rafael Pass, Ling Ren, and Elaine Shi
Flexible Byzantine Fault Tolerance *
Published in ACM CCS, 2019
Paper | Blog post
Dahlia Malkhi, Kartik Nayak, and Ling Ren
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
Locality-Preserving Oblivious RAM *
Paper
Published 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
Dfinity Consensus, Explored [TechReport] *
Paper
Ittai Abraham, Dahlia Malkhi, 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