Prateek Mittal

Prateek Mittal is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University, with associated faculty appointments in the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Information Technology Policy. His leadership roles include Associate Chair of the ECE Department (2025) and Director of Undergraduate Studies (2025), demonstrating his significant institutional impact.

Mittal's research focuses on privacy-preserving and secure systems, with particular expertise in privacy enhancing technologies (including anonymous communications and statistical data privacy), adversarial machine learning, and Internet/network security. His methodological approach draws on data science, network science, distributed systems, and applied cryptography. He has made foundational contributions to website fingerprinting research, developing precision optimizers that revolutionized open-world traffic analysis attacks.

His recent publications reveal a strategic shift toward examining security and privacy challenges in large language models and AI systems, with research on context manipulation attacks, privacy auditing frameworks, and robust defenses against adversarial inputs. This represents a natural evolution of his work from traditional network security to the frontier of AI security.

• Outstanding Paper Award and Honorable Mention, ICLR 2025
• ACM Distinguished Member (2024)
• Distinguished Alumni Awards from IIT Guwahati and UIUC (2024)
• ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award (2023)
• Multiple Caspar Bowden Award Runner Up recognitions (2020-2022)
• National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2016)

Professor Mittal has received consistent recognition for teaching excellence through Princeton Engineering's Commendation List in multiple years. His research program has been supported by prestigious funding from ARO, ONR, NSF, and industry partners including Google, Facebook, IBM, Intel, and Cisco. He serves in significant leadership roles including Deputy Chair of the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award Committee (2025-2026) and Editorial Board member for Privacy Enhancing Technologies.