About me
Hi! I’m Ali Arastehfard, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Connecticut specializing in applied cryptography. My research focuses on privacy-preserving information retrieval and secure computation. Recently, I’ve been exploring Private RAG, particularly in the context of scalable private web search.
Beyond my core research, I’m increasingly interested in AI security and have had the opportunity to collaborate on several projects in this area through my lab.
Outside of research, I enjoy playing tennis, hiking new trails, and reading books—especially on social and behavioral psychology.
Updates
- September 2026: Our paper “KPIR-C: Keyword PIR with Arbitrary Server-Side Computation” has been accepted to appear at NDSS 2027 (Paper, Code).
- September 2026: I passed my dissertation proposal on September 9, 2026.
- July 2026: Our paper “Secure and Efficient Lp-Norm Computation for Two-Party Learning Applications” was accepted to appear at IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (IEEE TIFS) (Paper, Code).
- July 2026: I was awarded a Conference Participation Award from the UConn Graduate School to present a poster at Agentic AI Summit 2026 at UC Berkeley, hosted by the Responsible Decentralized Intelligence (RDI) Foundation (Event).
- Spring 2026: I was awarded a Predoctoral fellowship.
- November 2025: Our paper “SecureV2X: An Efficient and Privacy-Preserving System for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) Applications” has been accepted to appear at ACM SAC’26 (Paper, Code).
- October 2025: Our paper “KPIR-C: Keyword PIR with Arbitrary Server-Side Computation” is now available (Paper).
- February 2025: Our paper “Secure and Efficient Video Inferences with Compressed 3-Dimensional Deep Neural Networks” has been accepted to appear at CODASPY 2025 (Paper, Code).
Professional Service
- ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2026) — Artifact Evaluation Program Committee Member / Reviewer
- NDSS, ACM CCS, USENIX Security, and IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) — External Reviewer / Subreviewer, 2022–2026
- IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC) — Reviewer, 2024–2026
- IEEE International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Intelligent Systems, and Applications (IEEE TPS) — External Reviewer / Subreviewer, 2022–2024
- ACM International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) — External Reviewer / Subreviewer, 2023