Shashank Agrawal

Shashank Agrawal is research manager at Coinbase, to build a new crypto (currency + graphy) research group! Interested in all things crypto (graphy + currency). I am was a Senior Technologist (Security & Cryptography) in the Software Solutions & Algorithms group at Western Digital Research. I conduct research on modern cryptographic tools like secure multi-party computation, zero-knowledge proofs, attribute-based encryption, searchable encryption, etc. I investigate how these tools can be used to address problems in information security, privacy, and blockchain. I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a PhD in Cryptography from the Computer Science department. Previously, I was a Senior Staff Research Scientist and Team Lead in the Advanced Cryptography group at Visa Research. I joined Visa Research in early stages and helped build a strong crypto team. I also mentored several great interns: Srinivasan Raghuraman (MIT), Saikrishna Badrinarayanan (UCLA), Benedikt Bünz (Stanford), and Ioannis Demertzis (UMD), some of whom later joined as full-time. At Visa, I worked on threshold schemes for symmetric-key encryption and password / biometric based authentication, and on cryptographic proofs for privacy and scalability in blockchains. I also helped develop new two-factor, multi-factor, and biometric authentication schemes.