Varun B. Gandhi
I am an AI security researcher at RAND Center on AI, Security, and Technology, where I serve as a principal investigator on ASI robustness and AI control research, focusing on the application of information security principles, cryptography, complexity theory, and formal methods to questions of high-assurance control and enforcement in advanced AI systems.
I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University, advised by Prof. Stephen Chong and Prof. Srinivas Devadas at MIT CSAIL. During my PhD, I spent time at Microsoft Research and Cloudflare Research, where I conducted research in systems security and confidential computing.
Email | Curriculum Vitae | Github | Harvard | Office Hours
News
Fall 2025: AI Security Researcher at RANDSummer 2025: Research internship with Cloudflare Research
Fall 2024: U.S. Patent Approved on Liveness guarantees in secure enclaves using health tickets
Spring 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. (Under Submission).
Varun Gandhi, Simon Langowski, Stephen Chong, and Srinivas Devadas
Rethinking Verifiable Execution for Confidential AI Compute
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