In this talk, I will present three lines of research with my collaborators that address these challenges. First, I will discuss results on achieving communication-efficient general MPC in a constant number of rounds, together with lower bounds that highlight inherent complexity barriers. Second, I will describe how planted graph assumptions and their variants can be leveraged to build MPC primitives—such as secret sharing and private simultaneous messages—that use only logarithmic-sized, reusable public information. Finally, I will introduce the model of one-way secure computation, which exploits noise in communication channels to enable secure function evaluation. This model yields both positive and negative results, with applications to cryptographic puzzles and e-cash systems.

Bio: Varun Narayanan just completed postdoctoral research in the Computer Science department at UCLA, hosted by Prof. Rafail Ostrovsky. He previously held a postdoctoral position at Technion, working with Prof. Yuval Ishai and Prof. Eyal Kushilevitz. He earned his PhD from TIFR, Mumbai, advised by Dr. Vinod Prabhakaran.

Varun’s research focuses on theoretical and practical aspects of cryptography, with an emphasis on secure multiparty computation.