Aarav Varshney

I’m a Researcher at Nanyang Technological University. My research focuses on applied cryptography, specifically in designing and implementing protocols that are compatible with existing network infrastructure such as TLS. My supervisor at NTU is Anupam Chattopadhay.

Previously, I worked under Mahavir Jhawar at Ashoka University on developing privacy-preserving solutions and post-quantum cryptography. As a software engineer, I worked at Amuse Labs under Sudheendra Hangal on integrating voice-based assistants like Amazon’s Alexa in their product offerings. At SALT, a Y Combinator-backed startup, I worked on automating document generation to make finance documentation easy. I have also co-founded two startups: Beyond Design Studio and Jaan Pehchan.

For my undergraduate thesis, I developed a new anonymous credential protocol that works with standard protocols like TLS and SMTP to allow employees to anonymously prove their membership in an organization when reporting misconduct. This builds on prior work by Wang et al. on blind certificate authorities, which addressed the challenge employees face in providing proof to journalists without risking retaliation. My protocol reduces computation and implementation costs while still enabling anonymous proof generation.

I recently began working on post-quantum cryptography, focusing on securing existing communication systems that are resistant to quantum attacks. We have built a post-quantum key distribution framework for DRDO, India’s defense research wing, to securely distribute encryption keys.