Varun Gandhi
I am a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, advised by Prof. Stephen Chong and Prof. Srinivas Devadas at MIT CSAIL. I am broadly interested in systems security with an emphasis on building secure, trustworthy, and scalable distributed systems. My research aims to address the fundamental problem of secure remote computation. I develop hardware-enforced isolation mechanisms and cryptographic verification techniques to scale trusted and verifiable computation in datacenters.
I have had the opportunity to spend two summers at Microsoft Research, Redmond, where I interned with Dr. Stefan Saroiu and Dr. Alec Wolman at the Intelligent Networked Systems Group, followed by an internship at the Cloud and Infrastructure Security Group with Dr. Sangho Lee and Dr. Marcus Peinado.
Prior to joining Harvard, I worked at Microsoft Research as a pre-doctoral research fellow with Dr. Phil Bernstein on an open source distributed systems programming framework called Orleans. I studied computer science at University of Cambridge, where I was advised by Prof. Alastair Beresford and worked on mitigating SSL attacks in mobile devices. As an undergrad, I had a great time predicting SSNs under the guidance of Prof. Alessandro Acquisti at Carnegie Mellon.
I enjoy intra-mural rowing and have been a member of Harvard Griffin Graduate Rowing and Girton College Boat Club.
Email | Curriculum Vitae | Github | Harvard | Office Hours
News
Fall 2024: U.S. Patent Approved on Liveness guarantees in secure enclaves using health ticketsSpring 2024: U.S. Patent Approved on Automated recovery of far edge computing infrastructure
Summer 2023: OMNILog accepted to appear at USENIX Security’23
Summer 2022: Research internship with the Cloud and Infra Security Group, MSR Redmond
Fall 2021: Co-Inventor on two patent applications filed by Microsoft
Summer 2021: Research internship with the INS Group, MSR Redmond
Spring 2020: Awarded Harvard Derek C. Bok Certificate of Distinction in Teaching
Spring 2020: IME: Isolated Monitor Execution accepted to appear at HotCloud’20
Fall 2018: Awarded Harvard Ralph H. Watson Graduate Science and Engineering Fellowship
Working Papers
Rethinking Runtime Integrity Guarantees in Distributed AI Frameworks.
Varun Gandhi, Simon Langowski, Stephen Chong, and Srinivas Devadas
Privacy Verification in AI workloads
Varun Gandhi, Stephen Chong, and Srinivas Devadas
Publications and Patents
Rethinking System Audit Architectures for High Event Coverage and Synchronous Log Availability
V. Gandhi, S. Banerjee, A. Agarwal, A. Ahmad, S. Lee, and M. Peinado
32nd USENIX Security Symposium, 2023
[Paper]
[Slides]
[Code]
[Talk]
Automated recovery of far edge computing infrastructure in a 5g network
S. Sariou, V. Gandhi, A. Wolman, and L.P. Cox
U.S. Patent 11,900,127
[Paper]
Liveness guarantees in secure enclaves using health tickets
S. Sariou, V. Gandhi, A. Wolman, and L.P. Cox
U.S. Patent 12,067,111
[Paper]
Rethinking Isolation Mechanisms for Datacenter Multitenancy
V. Gandhi, and J. Mickens
12th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing, 2020
[Paper]
[Slides]
[Talk]
Service
Shadow PC, IEEE Security and Privacy, 2021
Teaching
Teaching Fellow, CS 153 Compilers, Fall 2023
Teaching Fellow, CS 262 Introduction to Distributed Computing, Spring 2023
Teaching Fellow, APCOMP 221, Critical Thinking in Data Science, Spring 2020