Rasoul Akhavan Mahdavi

Hello! My name is Rasoul. I am a research scientist at Google, where I work on improving the performance of private computation in real-world applications.

I received my Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo under the supervision of Florian Kerschbaum and as a member of the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) lab. I also 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 as a Security Scientist and at the Private Computing team at Google as a Student Researcher.

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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
Select Talks
UIUC Research Seminar, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA, Oct 23rd, 2025
Crypto Seminar at UT Austin, Austin, Texas, USA, Oct 21st, 2025
MIT, Boston, USA, Oct. 6th, 2025
JP Morgan, New York, USA, Sept. 19th, 2025
Ontario Crypto Day, Waterloo, Canada, June 6th, 2025
USENIX Security 2024, Philadelphia, USA, August 14th, 2024
ACM CCS 2023, Copenhagen, Denmark, November 15th, 2023
Supervision
Julian Birsan (URA, University of Waterloo, Fall 2025)
Haoyan Ni (URA, University of Waterloo, Fall 2022)
Dimitry Linkov (URA, University of Waterloo, Fall 2021 and Winter 2022)
Roy Stracovsky (URA, University of Waterloo, Winter and Spring 2022)
Sophia Theresa Pietsch (URA, University of Waterloo, Fall 2021)
News

March 2026: I joined Google as a Research Scientist in New York.

Jan 2026: I defended my PhD thesis!

Jan 2026: Our paper has been accepted to USENIX Security 2026!

Sept 2025: Our paper has been accepted to IEEE S&P 2026!

June 2025: I gave a talk at Ontario Crypto Day.

May 2025: Our paper has been accepted to IEEE S&P 2025!

Sept. 2024: I have joined the Private Computing team at Google as a Student Researcher in New York.

Aug 2024: I presented our work at USENIX Security 2024 in Philadelphia.

March 2024: I passed my PhD candidacy exam.

Nov 2023: I presented our work at ACM CCS 2023 in Copenhagen.