Boilermakers' Applied Research in Cryptography

@ Purdue University, West Lafayette
Learn more Meet our Team

The Boilermakers Applied Research in Cryptography (BARC) lab works on a variety of research projects related to privacy-preserving technologies and applied cryptography. We are always looking to recruit highly motivated and interested students! Please feel free to apply even if you have no prior research experience!

You can contact at clg@cs.purdue.edu for any questions, and if you are interested in getting involved, fill out the Google Form

Learn about our projects

Meet our Team


Assistant Professor

Christina Garman

Assistant Professor clg@cs.purdue.edu
Trainer

Alex Seto

PhD Student, Graduate Research Assistant
Trainer

Yongming Fan

PhD Student, Graduate Research Assistant
Trainer

Jacob White

PhD Student, Graduate Research Assistant
Trainer

Saurav Chittal

MS Student, Graduate Research Assistant

Meet our Undergrads


    Sharanya Devgon

Alumni


Trainer

Priyam Biswas

PhD, Currently at Intel
Trainer

Arushi Arora

PhD, Currently at Oracle

Undergrad Alumni


    Walt Weiffenbach
    Xinyi Guan
    Kevin Jones
    Alexandre C. Moraes
    Trey Rosenfeldt
    Chase Thompson
    Ga Hyun (Emily) Song
    Yuquan Xu
    Arnav Gupta
    Jinen Setpal
    Connor Cai
    Benton Rupp
    Drew Hatfield
    Nikolas Damalas
    Raj Karra
    Devansh Panirwala
    Nikhilendra Singh Rathore
    Sehajbir Randhawa
    Sonia Rista
    Varun Shah
    Shravan Suravarjjala
    Zheying Lu
    Patrick Cunningham
Learn what's happening at BARC

Our Projects

TEEs

With TEEs rapidly becoming commonplace in real world privacy-preserving deployments, my group works to understand how TEEs fail in practice and what implications these failures can have on deployed systems. We analyze many common TEE-based deployments and their implications on privacy-enhancing technologies. Check out our recent work on TEE.fail and Wiretap.

zk-creds

zk-creds is a toolkit for privacy-preserving authentication protocols and anonymous credentials that offers flexible identity assertions and does not need trusted issuers. zk-creds is the first usage of general-purpose zero-knowledge proofs rather than bespoke proof systems over blind signatures to construct anonymous credential schemes.

Bento

Our architecture, Bento, allows users to write functions and upload them to willing Tor relays. The architecture protects relays from the functions they are running on behalf of other users, and protects the users from the relays running their functions. We are developing a myriad of functions that demonstrate that a programmable Tor can be a more secure, robust, and anonymous Tor. Learn more about Bento!

Crypto Binaries

Identification of cryptographic primitives can be used to detect the presence of malicious payloads in binaries as well as a tool for binary analysis. This project aims to develop a novel approach to identify different cryptographic algorithms in heavily obfuscated binaries.
Read

Our Papers

TEE.fail: Breaking Trusted Execution Environments via DDR5 Memory Bus Interposition(pdf)

Jalen Chuang, Alex Seto, Nicolas Berrios, Stephan van Schaik, Christina Garman, Daniel Genkin, IEEE S&P 2026

WireTap: Breaking Server SGX via DRAM Bus Interposition(pdf)

Alex Seto, Oytun Kuday Duran, Samy Amer, Jalen Chuang, Stephan van Schaik, Daniel Genkin, Christina Garman, ACM CCS 2025

Improving the Performance and Security of Tor’s Onion Services(pdf)

Arushi Arora, Christina Garman, PETS 2025

Achieving Keyless CDNs with Conclaves (pdf)

Stephen Herwig, Christina Garman, Dave Levin, USENIX Security 2020
Read

News and Updates

Our paper introducing the first truly "keyless CDN" has been accepted to USENIX Security 2020.(read)

Our poster "Bento -- Bringing Network Function Virtualization to Tor" has been accepted to ACM CCS 2020. Congratulations Bento Team!