Overview

I am an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. Before joining Brown, I was a researcher at Microsoft Research (Redmond Lab).

My research is in cryptography and is driven by real-world problems from privacy, security and surveillance. My primary focus is on the design and cryptanalysis of encrypted algorithms, which are efficient algorithms that operate on end-to-end encrypted data. I maintain interests in various aspects of theory and systems, including applied and theoretical cryptography, data structures and algorithms, data systems, algorithmic fairness, game theory and technology policy.

I direct the Encrypted Systems Lab and am a member of the CAPS group.

Advising

• Postdoc: Tarik Moataz

• Phd students: Archita Agarwal, Ghous Amjad, Marilyn George, Sam Zhao (co-advised with Stan Zdonik)

• MSR interns: Sherman Chow, Anurag Khandelwal, Xianrui Meng, Naveed Muhammad, Tarik Moataz, Olya Ohrimenko, Charalampos Papamanthou, Mariana Raykova, Ben Riva, Saeed Sadeghian, Lei Wei

Teaching

• Spring: CS16: Introduction to Algorithms and Data Structures
• Fall: CS2950-v: Topics in Applied Cryptography

Recent Papers (Full List)

• SQL on Structurally-Encrypted Databases
  Seny Kamara, Tarik Moataz
  Asiacrypt ‘18
  (full pdf)

• Breach-Resistant Structured Encryption
  Ghous Amjad, Seny Kamara, Tarik Moataz
  PETS ‘19
  (full pdf)

• Structured Encryption and Leakage Suppression
  Seny Kamara, Tarik Moataz, Olya Ohrimenko
  CRYPTO ‘18
  (proceedings pdf)

• National Academies Consensus Report: Decrypting the Encryption Debate.
  F. Cate (Chair), D. Boneh, F. Chang, S. Charney, S. Goldwasser, D. Hoffman, S. Kamara, D. Kris, S. Landau, S. Lipner, R. Littlehale, K. Martin, H. Rishikof, P. Weinberger.
  (report, overview@Lawfare)

• Boolean Searchable Symmetric Encryption with Worst-Case Sub-Linear Complexity
  Seny Kamara, Tarik Moataz
  Eurocrypt ‘17
  (proceedings pdf)

Projects

• Pixek: an end-to-end encrypted camera app
  Martin Zhu, Tarik Moataz, Seny Kamara
  (overview+app; Video@RWC18; Video@OURSA; Wired; CBC Spark; BoingBoing)

• Clusion: an open source encrypted search library
  Tarik Moataz, Seny Kamara
  (overview; code)

• Signal Search
  Joe Engelman, Sam Zhao, Tarik Moataz, Seny Kamara
  (overview; code)

Essays & Surveys

• How to Search on Encrypted Data [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
• Is the NSA Metadata Program Legal?
• Restructuring the NSA Metadata Program (MIT Tech Review)
• Are Compliance and Privacy Always at Odds? (Lawfare)
• How Not to Learn Cryptography