A picture of Jacob

Jacob White

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

Biography && Research

I am a 4th year PhD student at Purdue University, advised by Dr. Christina Garman. My research focuses on designing and analyzing cryptographic implementations at the intersection of privacy and verifiability, including identity verification, access control, and attestation for Internet-based applications and infrastructure using zero knowledge proofs. However, I am broadly interested in many related topics as well, including embedded systems, hardware security, network security, and formal verification.

Education && Service

I serve as the Vice President of the Computer Science Graduate Student Association (CSGSA), leading and organizing various social, mentorship, and advocacy initiatives within my department. I create Capture The Flag (CTF) challenges and teach cryptography workshops as a part of b01lers. As a TA, I graded rojects and exams and engage with CS students studying cybersecurity. I also served as the Purdue Graduate Student Government (PGSG) Senator from 2022-2024, advocating for students' needs to Purdue and the Greater Lafayette community.




News

2025-04-25

I advised and audited the cryptographic design of one of the Purdue teams in MITRE eCTF 2025, which implemented secure Satellite TV data stream channel encodings/decodings. I also explored opportunities for performing power analysis side channel attacks on some teams' insecure implementations. We placed 2nd out of 115!
2025-03-12

I co-chaired an organizing committee to host the inaugural Purdue Computer Science Graduate Research Symposium, with over 250 CS students and faculty given the chance to present and discuss their current and future research directions. Thank you to everyone in the department who helped make this vision a reality!
2024-06-01

I was awarded the Ross-Lynn Research Scholar Award, a year-long PhD/postdoctoral grant sponsored by Purdue to continue my research on anonymous credentials. The proposal can be viewed here.
2024-04-26

I led Purdue's crypto design and documentation team for MITRE eCTF 2024, designing secure embedded medical device infrastructure and presenting our attack / defense efforts. We placed 3rd out of 97 and won Best Poster Award (again)!
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 authentication 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 Purdue's crypto protocol design and documentation team for MITRE eCTF 2023, designing secure embedded car keyfob access and presenting our attack / defense efforts. 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]