Sanjam Garg, an alumnus of IIT-Delhi, has won the Google-sponsored Doctoral Dissertation Award for developing a technique to protect against cyber attacks.
Hailing him as the “innovator of breakthrough cyptography technology”, the New York-based Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) said the tools developed by Garg enable the first secure solution to the problem of making computer programme code “unintelligible” while preserving its functionality.
This problem, known as software obfuscation, conceals the programme’s purpose or its logic in order to prevent tampering, deter reverse engineering, or as a challenge to readers of the source code, the ACM says, adding: “His (Garg’s) approach makes it impossible to reverse-engineer the obfuscated software without solving mathematical problems that could take hundreds of years to work out on today’s computers.”
Garg, who received his PhD in computer science from University of California los Angeles (UClA) last year, writing his dissertation on “Candidate Multilinear Maps”. Garg’s paper presents new mathematical tools that serve as key ingredients for transforming a program into a “jigsaw puzzle” of encrypted pieces.
A Josef Raviv Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Centre, Garg will receive the Doctoral Dissertation Award and its $20,000 prize at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on June 21, in San Francisco. Financial sponsorship of the award is provided by Google Inc.
ACM calls itself the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society that delivers resources that advance computing as a science and a profession. It is said to provide the computing field’s premier Digital library and serves its members and the computing profession with leading-edge publications, conferences, and career resources.