Jain Earns National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER)

Wednesday, March 12, 2025

Assistant professor Aayush Jain has earned a Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award from the NSF. Jain's research seeks new and underexplored mathematical sources of hardness for cryptography.

For many years, cryptography has enabled a secure communication infrastructure by relying on the difficulty or "hardness" of solving special mathematical problems. 

Aayush Jain, an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department, has received a Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The awards are the foundation's most prestigious for young faculty researchers. Jain will use the $600,000 award to study new and underexplored mathematical sources of hardness for cryptography as well as support graduate research in this area.

These computational problems, which are hard on average, form the foundational building block of modern cryptography. Yet, despite decades of research studying and leveraging these problems, only a few sources of hardness are commonly used in cryptography.

Jain’s project is dedicated to a holistic study of new sources of hardness, including: (a) a fundamental exploration of the hardness of new cryptographic assumptions, (b) the design of new techniques to leverage these hard problems for achieving new feasibility results and more efficient cryptographic mechanisms such as efficient encrypted computation, including multi-party computation and homomorphic encryption and (c) addressing the severe shortage of assumptions underpinning post-quantum cryptography.

Additionally, the project aims to advance the use of natural computational problems that arise in the domain of statistical inference for cryptography and the underlying mechanisms (such as low-degree tests and sum-of-squares lower bounds) to rigorously analyze any new assumptions. Jain also devotes time to the Prison Math Project that aims to improve employment prospects and reduce recidivism of individuals upon release from correctional facilities. Additional educational efforts will also serve to further bridge the fields of cryptography, complexity theory and statistics.