Hello!

I’m a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), in Germany.

I work in the Distributed Systems and Security & Privacy groups, where I am co-advised by Peter Druschel and Deepak Garg. I am broadly interested in designing, building, and analyzing secure and privacy-preserving distributed systems. In particular, I am studying cryptographic techniques that run computation on sensitive private data; my research focus is to apply these techniques to real-world large-scale distributed systems, and to explore the consequent trade-offs between security, efficiency, and functionality.

Recently, I have been working on a secure selective analytics (SSA) platform. This platform is secure under a strong threat model that leverages Multi-Party Computation (MPC) to place trust on a set of independent Trusted Execution Environments. This platform is selective as it allows data sources to a priori restrict the use of their sensitive data to a pre-defined set of queries, run by specific analysts, and for a limited period. Currently, I am working on extending its use cases to support practical MPC-based ML training over very large sensitive datasets under the same threat model.

Previously, I explored different areas such as network side channels and secure mobile systems: I worked on Pacer, a project aimed to ensure data privacy in Cloud services against network side-channel leaks, and enClosure, a project on secure and private communication enabled by chains of mobile encounters.

Besides research, I’m quite enthusiastic about a bunch of things: traveling, cinema, books, comics, guitar, food, complaining, and complaining about food – especially if claimed to be Italian.