Rasoul Akhavan Mahdavi

Hello! My name is Rasoul and I am a Ph.D. candidate under the supervision of Florian Kerschbaum. I'm also a member of the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) lab at the University of Waterloo .

I hold a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology. I have previously interned at RBC and am currently a student researcher at Google.

Email / Google Scholar / Twitter / Github

Research

My work primarily focuses on designing efficient secure and private computation protocols, designed for real-world applications. I focus specifically on applications of Homomorphic Encryption and Secure Multi-party Computation, with a focus on Private Information Retrieval. I have also worked on projects on Private-set intersection, and Differential Privacy.

Publications

Peer2PIR: Private Queries for IPFS
Miti Mazmudar, Shannon Veitch, Rasoul Akhavan Mahdavi,
46th International IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, IEEE S&P 2025
arXiv / code

PEPSI: Practically Efficient Private Set Intersection in the Unbalanced Setting
Rasoul Akhavan Mahdavi, Nils Lukas, Faezeh Ebrahimianghazani, Thomas Humphries, Bailey Kacsmar, John Premkumar, Xinda Li, Simon Oya, Ehsan Amjadian, Florian Kerschbaum
33st USENIX Security Symposium, 2024, Philadelphia, USA
paper / code

Level Up: Private Non-Interactive Decision Tree Evaluation using Levelled Homomorphic Encryption
Rasoul Akhavan Mahdavi, Haoyan Ni, Dimitry Linkov, Florian Kerschbaum
30th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, ACM CCS 2023
paper / arXiv / code

Faster Secure Comparisons with Offline Phase for Efficient Private Set Intersection
Florian Kerschbaum, Erik-Oliver Blass, Rasoul Akhavan Mahdavi
Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, NDSS 2023
paper / arXiv / code

Selective MPC: Distributed Computation of Differentially Private Key Value Statistics
Thomas Humphries, Rasoul Akhavan Mahdavi, Shannon Veitch, Florian Kerschbaum
29th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, ACM CCS 2022
paper / arXiv / code

Constant-weight PIR: Single-round Keyword PIR via Constant-weight Equality Operators
Rasoul Akhavan Mahdavi, Florian Kerschbaum
31st USENIX Security Symposium, 2022, Boston, USA
paper / code

Practical Over-Threshold Multi-Party Private Set Intersection
Rasoul Akhavan Mahdavi, Thomas Humphries, Bailey Kacsmar, Simeon Krastnikov, Nils Lukas, John A. Premkumar, Masoumeh Shafieinejad, Simon Oya, Florian Kerschbaum, Erik-Oliver Blass
36th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, 2020, Online
paper / code

Posters

Faster Evaluation of AES using TFHE
Roy Stracovsky, Rasoul Akhavan Mahdavi, Florian Kerschbaum
First annual FHE.org conference, affiliated with Eurocrypt 2022, Trondheim, Norway
poster

Constant-weight PIR
Rasoul Akhavan Mahdavi, Florian Kerschbaum
2022 Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute Annual Conference, Waterloo, Canada
poster / link to event