Alexander R. Block Email: block9@purdue.edu Advisor: Jeremiah Blocki Office: LWSN 2161 #2

About

I am a sixth year Ph.D Student at Purdue University in the Computer Science department. My broad research interests are in Theoretical Cryptography. More specifically, my interests lie in error-correcting codes and their applications to cryptography, as well as efficient proof and argument systems. I am a member of the Cryptography Group and the Theory Group at Purdue.

Publications

• \(P_4\)-free Partition and Cover Numbers
  Alexander R. Block, Simina Brânzei, Hemanta K. Maji, Himanshi Mehta, Tamalika Mukherjee, and Hai H. Nguyen
  in submission [pdf]
  
  
• Locally Decodable/Correctable Codes for Insertions and Deletions
  Alexander R. Block, Jeremiah Blocki, Elena Grigorescu, Shubhang Kulkarni, and Minshen Zhu
  in FSTTCS 2020 [pdf]
  
  
• Public-Coin Zero-Knowledge Arguments with (almost) Minimal Time and Space Overheads
  Alexander R. Block, Justin Holmgren, Alon Rosen, Ron D. Rothblum, and Pratik Soni
  in TCC 2020 [pdf] [talk]
  
  
• Secure Computation with Constant Communication Overhead using Multiplication Embeddings
  Alexander R. Block, Hemanta K. Maji, and Hai H. Nguyen
  in INDOCRYPT 2018 [pdf]
  
  
• Secure Computation using Leaky Correlations (Asymptotically Optimal Constructions)
  Alexander R. Block, Divya Gupta, Hemanta K. Maji, and Hai H. Nguyen.
  in TCC 2018 [pdf] [slides]
  
  
• Secure Computation based on Leaky Correlations: High Resilience Setting
  Alexander R. Block, Hemanta K. Maji, and Hai H. Nguyen.
  in CRYPTO 2017 [pdf]
  
  

Projects and Presentations

• A Sublinear Upper Bound on Our Combinatorial Problem
  talk given at Purdue TCS Reading Group
  [slides]
  
  
• Modeling and Analysis of Simple Market Strategies
  final report for CS 523 Social, Economic, and Legal Aspects of Security in Spring 2017 with Professor Mikhail Atallah.
  [pdf] [slides]
  
  
• Embedding Multiplications
  for poster session at Midwest Theory Day 2017.
  [poster]
  
  
• Hardness of Computing the Biclique Partition Number
  talk given at Purdue Crypto Reading Group.
  [slides]
  
  
• Randomness Extraction
  talk given at Purdue Crypto Reading Group.
  [slides]
  
  
• Combined Games
  Alexander R. Block and Boao Huang (UC Irvine), advised by Dr. Sarah Eichhorn (UC Irvine).
  [pdf]
  

Internships

• June 2019-August 2019: Graduate Fellow at the IDC Herzliya FACT Center under the guidence of Professor Alon Rosen

Scientific Service

• External Reviewer for NDSS 2021
• External Reviewer for TCC 2020
• External Reviewer for SCN 2020
• External Reviewer for CRYPTO 2020
• External Reviewer for ITCS 2020
• External Reviewer for NDSS 2020
• External Reviewer for ITCS 2019
• External Reviewer for TCC 2017
• External Reveiwer for TCC 2016-B

Teaching Assistant Positions

• [Fall 2019]: Graduate TA for CS 51500 (Graduate Matrix Computations) with Professor David Gleich
• [Spring 2019]: Graduate TA for CS 58400 (Graduate Theory of Computation and Computational Complexity) with Professor Simina Brânzei
• [Fall 2016]: Graduate TA for CS 55500 (Graduate Cryptography) with Professor Hemanta Maji (class website) (TA website)
• [Spring 2016]: Graduate TA for CS 18200 (Undergraduate Foundations of Computer Science) with Professor Ananth Grama
• [Fall 2015]: Graduate TA for CS 18200 (Undergraduate Foundations of Computer Science) with Professor Greg Frederickson

Education

CS at Purdue University

• PhD Student
• 2015-...
• M.S. Computer Science
• August 2015 - May 2019

University of California, Irvine

• B.S. Mathematics
• B.S. Information & Computer Science
• 2011-2015