From Proofs to Practice: Tackling Challenges of Deploying Modern Cryptography by Assoc Prof Wang Xiao

Abstract

Modern cryptographic protocols are essential for securing information across its entire lifecycle. Despite major theoretical and practical advances, their widespread deployment still faces challenges—particularly in secure multi-party computation, zero- knowledge proofs, and related primitives. These challenges often stem from trade-offs between efficiency, security guarantees, and usability. My research tackles these issues by unifying theoretical insights with practical protocol design and system implementation. In this talk, I will highlight several efforts to bridge this gap, demonstrating how principled cryptographic design can enable both stronger security and broader adoption in practice.

Biography

Xiao Wang is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University. His research spans practical secure multi-party computation, zero-knowledge proofs, and post- quantum cryptography, with applications to artificial intelligence, formal methods, and health informatics. He was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT and Boston University and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. He received a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, two Best Paper Awards at ACM CCS, a Best Paper Award at ACM CS+LAW, and an ACM CCS Best Paper runner-up. He has also received faculty awards from Google, JPMorgan, and Meta.