About

Alexandra Boldyreva is an accomplished researcher in the areas of cryptography and information security who has published nearly three dozen works about public key and other encryption methods and has received two test of time awards for her research. She holds partial appointments in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Computer Science. Boldyreva also serves as an associate professor for the Georgia Institute of Technology and is the coordinator for the information security master’s program in the College of Computing. She is a member of the Institute for Information Security & Privacy (IISP) and the Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization program (ACO), and was a past contributor to the IISP's predecessor, the Georgia Tech Information Security Center. She received her doctorate in computer science from the University of California, San Diego, and holds a bachelor's and master's degree in applied mathematics from St. Petersburg State Technical University in Russia.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Theoretical computer science
• Data Mining
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Privacy and Security of FIDO2 Revisited

  Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies · 2025-05-19

  articleOpen access

  We revisit the privacy and security analyses of FIDO2, a widely deployed standard for passwordless authentication on the Web. We discuss previous works and conclude that each of them has at least one of the following limitations: (i) impractical trusted setup assumptions, (ii) security models that are inadequate in light of state of the art of practical attacks, (iii) not analyzing FIDO2 as a whole, especially for its privacy guarantees. Our work addresses these gaps and proposes revised security models for privacy and authentication. Equipped with our new models, we analyze FIDO2 modularly and focus on its component protocols, WebAuthn and CTAP2, clarifying their exact security guarantees. In particular, our results, for the first time, establish privacy guarantees for FIDO2 as a whole. Furthermore, we suggest minor modifications that can help FIDO2 provably meet stronger privacy and authentication definitions and withstand known and novel attacks.

  PublisherDOI

• May the Force <i>Not</i> Be With You: Brute-Force Resistant Biometric Authentication and Key Reconstruction

  2025-11-19

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The use of biometric-based security protocols is on the steep rise. As biometrics become more popular, we witness more attacks. For example, recent BrutePrint/InfinityGauntlet attacks showed how to brute-force fingerprints stored on an Android phone in about 40 minutes. The attacks are possible because biometrics, like passwords, do not have high entropy. But unlike passwords, brute-force attacks are much more damaging for biometrics, because one cannot easily change biometrics in case of compromise. In this work, we propose a novel provably secure Brute-Force Resistant Biometrics (BFRB) protocol for biometric-based authentication and key reconstruction that protects against brute-force attacks even when the server storing biometric-related data is compromised. Our protocol utilizes a verifiable partially oblivious pseudorandom function, an authenticated encryption scheme, a pseudorandom function, and a hash. We formally define security for a BFRB protocol and reduce the security of our protocol to the security of the building blocks. We implement the protocol and study its performance for the ND-0405 iris dataset.

  PublisherDOI

• Format-Preserving Compression-Tolerating Authenticated Encryption for Images

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2025-12-06

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Understanding Leakage in Searchable Encryption: a Quantitative Approach

  Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies · 2024-07-06 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Searchable encryption, or more generally, structured encryption, permits search over encrypted data. It is an important cryptographic tool for securing cloud storage. The standard security notion for structured encryption mandates that a protocol leaks nothing about the data or queries, except for some allowed leakage, defined by the leakage function. This is due to the fact that some leakage is unavoidable for efficient schemes.\\ Unfortunately, it was shown by numerous works that even innocuous-looking leakage can often be exploited by attackers to undermine users' privacy and recover their queries and/or data, despite the structured encryption schemes being provably secure. Nevertheless, the standard security remains the go-to notion used to show the 'security' of structured encryption schemes. While it is not likely that researchers will design practical structured encryption schemes with no leakage, it is not satisfactory that very few works study ways to assess leakage.This work proposes a novel framework to quantify leakage. Our methodology is inspired by the quantitative information flow, and we call our method q-leakage analysis. We show how $q$-leakage analysis is related to the standard security. We also demonstrate the usefulness of q-leakage analysis by analyzing the security of two existing schemes with complex leakage functions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Provable Security Analysis of Butterfly Key Mechanism Protocol in IEEE 1609.2.1 Standard

  Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies · 2024-07-06 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The paper provides the first provable security analysis of the Butterfly Key Mechanism (BKM) protocol from IEEE 1609.2.1 standard. The BKM protocol specifies a novel approach for efficiently requesting multiple certificates for use in vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication. We define the main security goals of BKM, such as vehicle privacy and communication authenticity. We prove that the BKM protocol, with small modifications, meets those security goals. We also propose a way to significantly improve the protocol's efficiency without sacrificing security.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Encrypted Multi-map that Hides Query, Access, and Volume Patterns

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2024-01-01

  book-chapter1st author
  PublisherDOI

• Public-Key Cryptography – PKC 2023

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2023-01-01 · 12 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• MATERIAL FOR APPLYING A WEAR-RESISTANT COATING OF THE DIAMOND BIT BODY BY DETONATION METHOD

  Izvestiya of Samara Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article discusses carbide tungsten carbide materials for detonation coating of the diamond bit body. Various properties of these materials with their different composition are considered. Based on the above analysis, taking into account the most important characteristics (adhesion of the sprayed material to the surface of the bit body, microhardness and wear of the carbide coating) the material most suitable for surfacing the body of a six-blade PDC chisel has been selected. The coupling of the selected carbide material (VK 12) with the surface of the bit body during detonation spraying with the required coating thickness of 200 microns is presented.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Provable Security Analysis of FIDO2

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2021 · 32 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Security
  PublisherDOI

• Fuzzy Labeled Private Set Intersection with Applications to Private Real-Time Biometric Search.

  USENIX Security Symposium · 2021-01-01 · 8 citations

  article
  Publisher

Recent grants

• CAREER: Integrating Cryptography with Emerging Security Applications

  NSF · $400k · 2006–2012

• CT-ISG: New Security Properties for Hash and Trapdoor Functions

  NSF · $350k · 2008–2013

• TWC: Small: Collaborative: A Unifying Framework For Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Secure Communication Protocols

  NSF · $280k · 2014–2019

• TWC: Small: New Advances for Efficiently-Searchable Encryption

  NSF · $500k · 2013–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Mihir Bellare

  15 shared

• Adam O’Neill

  13 shared

• Bogdan Warinschi

  University of Bristol

  13 shared

• Virendra Kumar

  Qualcomm (United Kingdom)

  7 shared

• Nathan Chenette

  Rose–Hulman Institute of Technology

  7 shared

• Cristina Nita-Rotaru

  Northeastern University

  6 shared

• Samuel Jero

  6 shared

• Robert Lychev

  MIT Lincoln Laboratory

  5 shared