Gabriel Kaptchuk

Assistant Professor, Computer Science · University of Maryland

I’m an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, focusing on cryptography and privacy.

My research spans secure multiparty computation (MPC), zero-knowledge proofs, steganography, and differential privacy, alongside the intersection of law, algorithms, and algorithmic governance. I build cryptographic systems that take seriously the social contexts they are deployed into — asking not only what is possible, but what is responsible.

Before joining Maryland I was research faculty at Boston University. I completed my PhD at Johns Hopkins University in 2020, advised by Avi Rubin and Matt Green, and I’m affiliated with the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2) and UMIACS.

Gabriel Kaptchuk
Helpful Info
Office
IRB 5232
Email
kaptchuk (at) umd (dot) edu
CV
Download CV (PDF)
Prospective students
Working with me →
Pronouns
He / Him
Google Scholar DBLP
Recent News
  • USENIX Sec ’26 “Analyzing Cryptography in Context” accepted to USENIX Security 2026.
  • FOCI ’26 “Assemblage: Chipping Away at Censorship with Generative Steganography” accepted to FOCI 2026.
  • CHI ’26 “Having Confidence in My Confidence Intervals” accepted to CHI 2026.
  • Talk Privacy-preserving record linkage talk at the PrivaCI Symposium 2026.
  • Talk “From Privacy Enhancing Technologies to Purpose-Limiting Technologies” at the Privacy and Public Policy Conference 2026.
Students

Advisees, ordered by low-effort Fiat–Shamir:

Selected Publications
  • 2026Analyzing Cryptography in Context: A Cryptography-Native Approach to Threat Modeling — USENIX Security
  • 2026Making Sense of Private Advertising: A Principled Approach to a Complex Ecosystem — PoPETS
  • 2026Forget-me-not Trees: Mass-scale Auditable Key Transparency from Hash Functions — Preprint
  • 2026Deploying decryption oracles for fun and non-profit: Backing up with friends and TEEs — Preprint
  • 2022Stacking Sigmas: A Framework to Compose Σ-Protocols for Disjunctions — EUROCRYPT
  • 2021Meteor: Cryptographically Secure Steganography for Realistic Distributions — ACM CCS
  • 2021Fluid MPC: Secure Multiparty Computation with Dynamic Participants — CRYPTO
  • 2021“I need a better description”: User Expectations For Differential Privacy — ACM CCS (Best Paper Runner-up)