Mahimna Kelkar
mahimna [at] cs {dot} cornell (dot) edu
mahimna [at] purdue (dot) edu
I am a CS postdoc at Columbia University affiliated with
The Columbia-Ethereum Research Center.
I recently graduated with a PhD from Cornell where I was advised by
Ari Juels
.
My research focuses broadly on applied cryptography, security, and blockchains.
I am also a research scientist at
Offchain Labs
.
In Fall 2026, I will start as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at
Purdue
.
I plan to hire multiple PhD students in the 2025-26 application cycle. If you're interested, drop me an email and
apply
by Dec 1.
[CV]
[Scholar]
[Short Research Statement]
Latest manuscripts
The Sting Framework: Proving the Existence of Superclass Adversaries
Mahimna Kelkar
, Yunqi Li, Nerla Jean-Louis, Carolina Ortega Pérez, Kushal Babel, Andrew Miller, Ari Juels
2024
PROF: Protected Order Flow in a Profit-Seeking World
Kushal Babel, Nerla Jean-Louis, Yan Ji, Ujval Misra,
Mahimna Kelkar
, Kosala Yapa Mudiyanselage, Andrew Miller, Ari Juels
2024
All Publications
Breaking Omertà: On Threshold Cryptography, Smart Collusion, and Whistleblowing
Mahimna Kelkar*
, Aadityan Ganesh*, Aditi Partap, Joseph Bonneau, S. Matthew Weinberg (*equal contribution)
ACM CCS 2025
Liquefaction: Privately Liquefying Blockchain Assets
James Austgen, Andrés Fábrega,
Mahimna Kelkar
, Dani Vilardell, Sarah Allen, Kushal Babel, Jay Yu, Ari Juels
IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2025
Voting-Bloc Entropy: A New Metric for DAO Decentralization
Andrés Fábrega, Amy Zhao, Jay Yu, James Austgen, Sarah Allen, Kushal Babel,
Mahimna Kelkar
, Ari Juels
USENIX Security 2025
Secure Sorting and Selection via Function Secret Sharing
(alphabetical ordering)
Amit Agarwal, Elette Boyle, Nishanth Chandran, Niv Gilboa, Divya Gupta, Yuval Ishai,
Mahimna Kelkar
, Yiping Ma
ACM CCS 2024
Atomic and Fair Data Exchange via Blockchain
Ertem Nusret Tas, István András Seres, Yinuo Zhang, Márk Melczer,
Mahimna Kelkar
, Joseph Bonneau, Valeria Nikolaenko
ACM CCS 2024
Distinguished Paper Award
Complete Knowledge: Preventing Encumbrance of Cryptographic Secrets
Mahimna Kelkar*
, Kushal Babel*, Philip Daian*, James Austgen, Vitalik Buterin, Ari Juels (*equal contribution)
ACM CCS 2024
Computationally Secure Aggregation and Private Information Retrieval in the Shuffle Model
(alphabetical ordering)
Adrià Gascón, Yuval Ishai,
Mahimna Kelkar
, Baiyu Li, Yiping Ma, Mariana Raykova
ACM CCS 2024
Interactive Authentication
Deepak Maram,
Mahimna Kelkar
, Ittay Eyal
ACM CCS 2024
BoLD: Fast and Cheap Dispute Resolution
(alphabetical ordering)
Mario M. Alvarez et al.
AFT 2024
Compressing Unit-Vector Correlations via Sparse Pseudorandom Generators
(alphabetical ordering)
Amit Agarwal, Elette Boyle, Niv Gilboa, Yuval Ishai,
Mahimna Kelkar
, Yiping Ma
CRYPTO 2024
Information-Theoretic Single-Server PIR in the Shuffle Model
(alphabetical ordering)
Yuval Ishai,
Mahimna Kelkar
, Daniel Lee, Yiping Ma
ITC 2024
GoAT: File Geolocation via Anchor Timestamping
Deepak Maram,
Mahimna Kelkar
, Iddo Bentov, Ari Juels
FC 2024
Truncator: Time-space Tradeoff of Cryptographic Primitives
(alphabetical ordering)
Foteini Baldimtsi, Konstantinos Chalkias, Panagiotis Chatzigiannis,
Mahimna Kelkar
FC 2024
Lanturn: Measuring Economic Security of Smart Contracts Through Adaptive Learning
Kushal Babel*, Mojan Javaheripi*, Yan Ji,
Mahimna Kelkar
, Farinaz Koushanfar, Ari Juels
ACM CCS 2023
Themis: Fast, Strong Order-Fairness in Byzantine Consensus
Mahimna Kelkar
, Soubhik Deb, Sishan Long, Ari Juels, Sreeram Kannan
ACM CCS 2023
Prototyped by Chainlink
Zef: Low-latency, Scalable, Private Payments
Mathieu Baudet, Alberto Sonnino,
Mahimna Kelkar
, George Danezis
WPES 2023
Commercialized by Linera
Buying Time: Latency Racing vs. Bidding for Transaction Ordering
Akaki Mamageishvili,
Mahimna Kelkar
, Jan Christoph Schlegel, Edward Felten
AFT 2023
STROBE: Streaming Threshold Random Beacons
(alphabetical ordering)
Donald Beaver, Konstantinos Chalkias,
Mahimna Kelkar
, Lefteris Kokoris Kogias, Kevin Lewi, Ladi de Naurois, Valeria Nikolaenko, Arnab Roy, Alberto Sonnino
AFT 2023
One-Message Secure Reductions: On the Cost of Converting Correlations
(alphabetical ordering)
Yuval Ishai,
Mahimna Kelkar
, Varun Narayanan, Liav Zafar
CRYPTO 2023
Clockwork Finance: Automated Analysis of Economic Security in Smart Contracts
Kushal Babel*, Philip Daian*,
Mahimna Kelkar*
, Ari Juels (*equal contribution)
IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2023
SCRF Research Impact Award
Best 2023 DeFi Paper (awarded by the DeFi Workshop at CCS 2024)
Order-Fair Consensus in the Permissionless Setting
Mahimna Kelkar
, Soubhik Deb, Sreeram Kannan
Short version in APKC 2022
Best Paper Award
Secure Poisson Regression
Mahimna Kelkar
, Phi Hung Le, Mariana Raykova, Karn Seth
USENIX Security 2022
MPC-Friendly Symmetric Cryptography from Alternating Moduli: Candidates, Protocols, and Applications
(alphabetical ordering)
Itai Dinur, Steven Goldfeder, Tzipora Halevi, Yuval Ishai,
Mahimna Kelkar
, Vivek Sharma, Greg Zaverucha
CRYPTO 2021
Order-Fairness for Byzantine Consensus
Mahimna Kelkar
, Fan Zhang, Steven Goldfeder, Ari Juels
CRYPTO 2020
Flexible Signatures: Towards Making Authentication Suitable for Real-Time Environments
Duc V. Le,
Mahimna Kelkar
, Aniket Kate
ESORICS 2019
Other Works
DAO Decentralization: Voting-Bloc Entropy, Bribery, and Dark DAOs
James Austgen*, Andrés Fábrega*, Sarah Allen, Kushal Babel,
Mahimna Kelkar
, Ari Juels
2023.
Superseded by Voting-Bloc Entropy [FZY+25] and Liquefaction [AFK+25]
Dissertation
Rethinking Security for Emerging Decentralized Systems
Mahimna Kelkar
2025.
Cornell University PhD Dissertation
Selected Talks
Order-Fair Consensus
(based on [
K
ZGJ20], [
K
DK22], and [
K
DLJK23])
Industry:
Google, Facebook, Visa, a16z, Algorand, Chainlink, Flashbots, Offchain Labs, Protocol Labs, SEC Finhub
Universities:
Cornell, Duke, Purdue, Technion, UIUC
Conferences and Workshops:
CRYPTO'20, TCC'21, TPBC'21, Consensus Day '21, APKC'22, SBC'22, CCS'23
Complete Knowledge
CMU, Stanford, UPenn, a16z, IC3 Bootcamp, SBC'24, NYC Crypto Day, CCS'24, Boston University, MIT
Secure Poisson Regression
Google, PPML'21, USENIX Security'22
MPC-friendly Symmetric Cryptography
CRYPTO'21, TCC'21
Clockwork Finance
Technion, SEC Finhub, DeFi@CCS'24
PIR in the Shuffle Model
ITC'24
Zef
WPES'23
Timeboost
[M
K
SF23]
AFT'23
Internships and Visits
(Summer 2023)
a16z crypto research
-
Hosted by Joseph Bonneau, Valeria Nikolaenko, and Tim Roughgarden
(Spring 2022)
Technion
-
Hosted by Yuval Ishai
(Summer 2021)
Facebook Research
-
Novi Blockchain Cryptography Team
(Summer 2020)
Google Research
-
Private Computing Team hosted by Karn Seth and Mariana Raykova
(Summer 2018)
Sandia National Laboratories
(Summer 2017)
Amazon
-
Software Engineering Intern at AWS Lambda
Service
Program committees
: FC {2024, 2025}, DeFi Workshop {2023, 2024}
External reviewer
: FC 2020, CRYPTO {2020, 2021, 2024}, Eurocrypt 2022, DISC 2022, CCS 2022, USENIX Security 2020, DES Journal, AFT 2023, PODC 2024, ITCS 2025