Pratyush Mishra

Pratyush Mishra is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Computer and Information Science, where he is affiliated with the Security and Privacy Laboratory. His research focuses on the intersection of cryptographic proof systems and computer security, particularly on efficient implementations of zero-knowledge proofs and secure computation protocols.

Pratyush completed his PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, advised by Alessandro Chiesa and Raluca Ada Popa, and holds a BSc in EECS from UC Berkeley, where he worked with David Wagner. His current research group includes PhD students Anubhav Baweja, Tushar Mopuri, Bharath Namboothiry, and Alireza Shirzad, along with Matan Shtepel, a former research assistant who moved to CMU for his PhD.

His work spans advanced cryptographic techniques like zkSNARKs, accumulation schemes, and private delegation of provers, with applications in decentralized systems and secure inference. His recent publications focus on optimizing polynomial commitments, read-write streaming for SNARKs, and horizontally scalable proofs.

Key awards include:

• ACM SIGSAC Doctoral Dissertation Award Runner-Up (2022)
• CSAW Applied Research Award (2016) for Hidden Voice Commands

He teaches courses like CIS 5560: Cryptography and 7000-2: Theory and Practice of Succinct Zero Knowledge Proofs, covering topics such as symmetric cryptography, public-key encryption, digital signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, and secure multiparty computation. His lab contributes to the arkworks ecosystem for zero-knowledge proof libraries and co-founded the startup Aleo based on his research.