A picture of Jacob

Jacob White

(he/him or they/them)
Graduate {Research, Teaching} Assistant @ Purdue University
PhD Student, Computer Science (CS)
Curriculum Vitae (CV)

Biography

I am a 3rd year PhD student at Purdue University, and am honored to be advised by Dr. Christina Garman. I am interested in many topics including privacy, cryptographic automation, formal verification, network security, and human factors. I am also passionate about mentoring and teaching others, paying forward my education to help make what I study more accessible for everyone to learn and pursue themselves.

Research

My research focuses on the efficient design of privacy-enhancing crypto(graphy) for Internet applications and infrastructure. I aim to design cryptography which balances user privacy and identity attribution, all while making complex cryptography as easy as possible for non-experts to use.

Education && University Service

I serve as the Purdue Graduate Student Government (PGSG) Senator for CS, advocating for students by engaging closely with the department, university, and Greater Lafayette community. I create Capture The Flag (CTF) challenges and teach cryptography for b01lers. I also grade projects and exams and engage with CS students studying cybersecurity.




News

2024-02-02

I was awarded a student stipend to attend the 2024 Real World Crypto (RWC) Symposium and talk about my research!

2023-09-29

I was invited to present my work on zk-creds as a part of UIUC's security seminar for students and faculty!

2023-09-07

I have established a graduate student committee to assist the CS department in maintaining and extending quality instruction to students at the Indianapolis campus starting Fall 2024, serving as the Purdue Indy Transition Coordinator for the Computer Science Graduate Student Board!

2023-08-10

I implemented state-of-the-art techniques for deployable Internet routing security mechanisms at Los Alamos National Labs (LANL) and presented my work there. See slides for more details (approved for unlimited release under LA-UR-23-29806). Thanks to Michael Dixon for being an amazing mentor!

2023-04-26

I led the protocol design for b01lers' embedded car-fobs at MITRE eCTF 2023, presenting our attack / defense efforts to MITRE and the other teams. We placed 6th out of 60 and won Best Poster Award!

2023-03-25

I and another student won 1st place in the 2023 CyberFire Challenge hosted by Lawrence Livermore!

2022-12-12

Our paper on decentralized anonymous credentials for proving complex identity statements, zk-creds, has been accepted to IEEE S&P 2023. Thanks to Prof. Christina Garman for your guidance and support!



Selected Publications


  • zk-creds: Flexible Anonymous Credentials from zkSNARKs and Existing Identity Infrastructure. [PDF] [ePrint] [Code]
    Michael Rosenberg*, Jacob White*, Christina Garman, and Ian Miers. 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE SP'23), May 2023.
  • Authenticating Internet Routing Using Zero-Knowledge Proofs. [Slides]
    Jacob White, Zachary DeStefano, Michael Dixon. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), August 2023. LA-UR-23-29806.
  • Protected Automotive Remote Entry Device (PARED) Protocol. [PDF] [Poster]
    Siddharth Muralee*, Muhammad Ibrahim*, Jacob White*, et al. 2023 MITRE Embedded Capture The Flag (MITRE eCTF'23),
    April 2023. [BEST POSTER AWARD]