Kurt Rohloff 
Associate Professor, Computer Science | New Jersey Institute of Technology
Newark, NJ, UNITED STATES
Professor Rohloff focuses on encrypted computing, homomorphic encryption, lattice-based and applied cryptography and cybersecurity
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Biography
Kurt Rohloff is an associate professor of computer science at NJIT and the co-founder and director of the NJIT Cybersecurity Research Center. His research interests are in encrypted computing, homomorphic encryption, lattice-based cryptography, applied cryptography, cybersecurity, distributed information management, information access delegation, key management, software engineering, high-assurance design, mobile systems and secure communication protocols. Rohloff received a bachelor's in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and a master of science and doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Areas of Expertise (7)
Contact Tracing
Software Engineering
Cryptography Computer Security and Privacy
Cybersecurity
Cryptography
Encryption
Privacy
Accomplishments (2)
DARPA Director's Fellowship
2019
DARPA Young Faculty Award
2016
Education (3)
University of Michigan: Ph.D., Electrical Engineering: Systems 2004
University of Michigan: M.S., Electrical Engineering: Systems 2001
Georgia Institute of Technology: B.E.E., Electrical Engineering 1999
Affiliations (1)
- Duality Technologies
Links (4)
Media Appearances (6)
An Evolving Threat
NJBIZ online
2019-05-08
Even small businesses have to worry about cybersecurity, as attacks target employee social security numbers, bank account information and credit card numbers, according to NJIT's Kurt Rohloff.
Kurt Rohloff of Duality Technologies on the future of encryption
Silicon Republic online
2018-11-14
A pioneer in the world of cryptography, Kurt Rohloff discusses the business potential of homomorphic encryption.
Safety in Numbers: Computer Scientist Races to Develop Unhackable Code to Protect Everyone’s Data
Tap Into Newark
2018-07-13
Kurt Rohloff stands squarely against these invisible forces. Co-founder of the cybersecurity start-up, Duality Technologies, and director of the NJIT Cybersecurity Research Center, Rohloff is working full-throttle from his Newark base with the ambitious mission of developing a new worldwide cybersecurity standard that will be unhackable...
Wyden, Rubio, Warner Introduce “Student Right to Know Before You Go Act” to Empower Students as Consumers and Showcase New Privacy-Protecting Technology
Senator Ron Wyden Official Website
2017-11-29
"Insight into the financial benefits of education choices would be invaluable to students trying to navigate the modern marketplace of higher education, allowing them to make much more informed choices. Privacy-preserving technologies that enable computing on data while encrypted is far and away the best way to provide these insights while also protecting the privacy of US citizens."...
After Equifax breach, how worried should you be about your personal information?
NJTV News
2017-09-12
Computer Science Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology Kurt Rohloff said it’s more than just a small inconvenience. “I would say it definitely pays off in the long run. It’s definitely what I’d be doing if I were in that situation,” he said. Rohloff is also the co-founder and director of NJIT’s Cybersecurity Research Center. When asked if breaches are taking place more often or is it more often that we’re hearing about them, he replied, “Probably both.”...
OPM breach a failure on encryption, detection
Federal Times
2015-06-19
Not all experts agree. Kurt Rohloff, associate professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and director of the NJIT Cybersecurity Center questioned the claim that legacy systems can't support encryption. "The statement that legacy systems cannot encrypt may not be completely true," Rohloff said. "It may be very expensive to integrate encryption technologies with legacy systems but it is generally possible."...
Event Appearances (8)
Prototyping and Using Encrypted Computing Technologies to Protect Data
iSense Seminar Florida Atlantic University
2017-11-16
Computing on Encrypted Data
Waseda Univeristy Computer Science Seminar Waseda Univeristy, Tokyo, Japan
2017-06-07
Approaches to Indistinguishability Obfuscation
Tandon School of Engineering New York University
2017-02-25
Everything you Wanted to Know about DARPA but were Afraid to Ask
Computer Science Seminar NJIT
2016-09-19
Implementing Homomorphic Encryption to Enable Practical and Secure Computing
University of Tartu Computer Research Seminar University of Tartu
2016-03-15
Privacy-Preserving Publish-Subscribe using End-to-End Encryption
Workshop on Surveillance & Technology held with the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) Philadelphia, PA
2015-06-29
Applying Homomorphic Encryption for Practical Genomic Privacy
Dagstuhl Seminar 15431 Dagstuhl, Germany
2015-10-20
Towards Practical Implementations of Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Algebra and Cryptography Seminar City University of New York
2014-09-12
Research Focus (1)
Researchers apply privacy-preserving AI to large-scale genomic studies
2020-05-14
The team says the approach could be applied to other branches of medical research, such as clinical trials, drug repurposing and rare disease studies.
Patents (7)
System and method for merging encryption data without sharing a private key
9,628,450
Kurt Rohloff April 18, 2017
System and method to merge encrypted signals in distributed communication system
9,461,974
Kurt Rohloff October 4, 2016
System and method for encoding encrypted data for further processing
9,628,266
Kurt Rohloff and David Bruce Cousins April 18, 2017
System and Method for Mixing VoIP Streaming Data for Encrypted Processing
9,369,273
Kurt Rohloff and David Bruce Cousins June 14, 2016
System and method for operating on streaming encrypted data
9,338,144
Kurt Rohloff May 10 2016
System and method for merging encryption data using circular encryption key switching.\
9,325,671
Kurt Rohloff April 26, 2016
System and method to merge encrypted signals in distributed communication system
9,313,181
Kurt Rohloff April 12, 2016
Research Grants (7)
ONR Human-AI Symbiosis for Agile Planning
Offie of Naval Research $523,000
2018
GEARS: GENOMIC ANALYSIS RESEARCH WITH SECURITY
National Institutes of Health $149,500
2018-04-30
We propose the GEARS (GEnomic Analysis Research with Security) effort with the broad goal and vision of our proposal is to enable collaboration and joint analysis of medical data, without compromising data owners’ rights and complying with regulation and privacy concerns. This is achieved by introducing novel technologies from the domain of advanced cryptography that enable keeping raw data encrypted even while analyzing and computing on it...
Fully Homomorphic Encryption Research
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation $509,038
2017 Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) allows researchers to analyze encrypted data accurately without decrypting those data. It is an intriguing method for providing access to sensitive datasets while respecting both privacy concerns and licensing agreements and may eventually have significant use in privacy-protecting research protocols. This grant funds a project to demonstrate the usefulness of FHE algorithms in academic research.
Young Faculty Award MARSHAL
DARPA $450,000
2016
I2O Safeware, PALISADE
DARPA $3,400,000
2015
I2O SafeWare OPERA
DARPA $674,000
2015
International Crisis Early Warning System
DARPA $6,000,000
2009
Articles (3)
Why Encryption Holds the Secret to Data Security
TDWI UpsideKurt Rohloff
2019-03-29
Mathematically transforming information into something indistinguishable from gibberish, encryption guarantees that only approved users can reverse the transformation. The transformation's mathematical complexity underpins encryption's robust security.
A Scalable Implementation of Fully Homomorphic Encryption Built on NTRU
International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data SecurityKurt Rohloff, David Bruce Cousins
2014 In this paper we report on our work to design, implement and evaluate a Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) scheme. Our FHE scheme is an NTRU-like cryptosystem, with additional support for efficient key switching and modulus reduction operations to reduce the frequency of bootstrapping operations. Ciphertexts in our scheme are represented as matrices of 64-bit integers. The basis of our design is a layered software services stack to provide high-level FHE operations supported by lower-level lattice-based primitive implementations running on a computing substrate. We implement and evaluate our FHE scheme to run on a commodity CPU-based computing environment. We implemented our FHE scheme to run in a compiled C environment and use parallelism to take advantage of multi-core processors. We provide experimental results which show that our FHE implementation provides at least an order of magnitude improvement in runtime as compared to recent publicly known evaluation results of other FHE software implementations.
An update on SIPHER (scalable implementation of primitives for homomorphic encryption)—FPGA implementation using Simulink
IEEE Conference on High Performance Extreme Computing (HPEC)David Bruce Cousins, Kurt Rohloff, Chris Peikert, Rick Schantz
2012 Accelerating the development of a practical Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) scheme is the goal of the DARPA PROCEED program. For the past year, this program has had as its focus the acceleration of various aspects of the FHE concept toward practical implementation and use. FHE would be a game-changing technology to enable secure, general computation on encrypted data, e.g., on untrusted off-site hardware. However, FHE will still require several orders of magnitude improvement in computation before it will be practical for widespread use. Recent theoretical breakthroughs demonstrated the existence of FHE schemes, and to date much progress has been made in both algorithmic and implementation improvements. Specifically our contribution to the Proceed program has been the development of FPGA based hardware primitives to accelerate the computation on encrypted data using FHE based on lattice techniques. Our project, SIPHER, has been using a state of the art tool-chain developed by Mathworks to implement VHDL code for FPGA circuits directly from Simulink models. Our baseline Homomorphic Encryption prototypes are developed directly in Matlab using the fixed point toolbox to perform the required integer arithmetic. Constant improvements in algorithms require us to be able to quickly implement them in a high level language such as Matlab. We reported on our initial results at HPEC 2011. In the past year, increases in algorithm complexity have introduced several new design requirements for our FPGA implementation. This report presents new Simulink primitives that had to be developed to deal with these new requirements.
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