Henry
Corrigan-
Gibbs

I am an assistant professor in MIT's EECS department and a member of CSAIL. My research focuses on computer security, cryptography, and computer systems.

At MIT, I work with students and faculty in the PDOS and CSS research groups.

A longer version of my bio is here.

---

I build systems that use cryptography to empower and protect their users. The projects that excite me the most: (1) serve the interests of the end user, (2) provide strong and precise forms of security, often using new cryptographic ideas, and (3) have impact through real-world deployment.

My recent projects include:

• The Tiptoe system for private search, which lets a client search a chunk of the web while hiding its query from the search engine itself.
• Systems for private information retrieval, which allow a client to query a remote database server while hiding its query from the server. Our work has: reduced the computational cost of these schemes using preprocesing and lattice-based cryptography, strengthened the security properties they provide, and applied them to practical private-search problems.
• Larch, SafetyPin and True2F, systems for authentication that provide strong hardware-backed security protections, while still protecting against a wide class of hardware faults and backdoors.
  

In the past, I have worked on:

• Prio and Poplar, systems for the privacy-preserving collection of aggregate statistics (adopted by Mozilla's Firefox browser, offered as a service by ISRG, the entity behind Let's Encrypt, and used in Android and iOS to measure the effectiveness of their Exposure Notification systems). We have also investigated some theoretical questions that this work raised.
• The study of preprocessing attacks on cryptographic primitives and the risks they pose to our standardized primitives, such as the AES block cipher and the NIST family of elliptic curves.

For more details, please see my full list of publications.

---

I have served on the program committees of Real World Crypto 2024, Eurocrypt 2024, Real World Crypto 2023, Oakland 2023 (as an associate PC chair), Eurocrypt 2022, Oakland 2022, Oakland 2021, CRYPTO 2020, Oakland 2020, and CCS 2018. I am a co-organizer of the Charles River Crypto Day.

---

Before coming to MIT, I completed my PhD in computer science at Stanford, advised by Dan Boneh. I also spent one year as a postdoc at EPFL, hosted by Bryan Ford.

I graduated from Yale University in 2010 with a B.S. in computer science. Before that, I grew up in Berkeley, California and was a student at Berkeley High School.

---

A variety of companies and government agencies fund my group's research. See the "acknowledgements" sections of my papers for details on funding sources.