Tal Malkin Professor, IACR Fellow
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Crypto
Lab Research
Teaching
Professional
Activities
Students & Visitors
Biography
| Research |
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My main research area is cryptography. Much of my work is on the foundations of cryptography, and as such I fit right in with our Theory Group. I also work on practical aspects and applications of cryptography, and am a member of the DSI Cybersecurity center. I am very interested in connections between cryptography and other areas, especially complexity theory, systems security, and machine learning (but also other areas, including information theory, databases, hardware security, and biology). You can find more information on my specific interests by exploring the rest of this page (in particular my publications and the topics I chose for my advanced cryptography class). The webpage for my group, the Crypto Lab, has our publications, as well as the latest news from my group. You can also check out my dblp and Google Scholar pages. If you want to work with me, please start by reading my information for prospective students and visitors. |
| Teaching |
The classes I regularly teach at Columbia are the following
(most recent section of each class linked):
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| (Some) Professional Activities |
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Program Committee chair: EUROCRYPT 2025 (area chair), CRYPTO 2021 (co-chair), ACM CCS 2017 (co-chair), TCC 2016A (co-chair), ACNS 2015, CT-RSA 2008 Steering Committee chair: Theory of Crytpography Conference (TCC) 2020 – current (member since 2017) General Chair and Local Arrangements: TCC 2026 and FOCS 2026 (co-located), Real World Crypto 2020, Real World Crypto 2017, PKC 2006 |
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| Students and Visitors |
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Current PhD Students:
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Past Postdocs and Visitors:
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| Biography |
Tal Malkin is a professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, where she directs the Cryptography Lab, and was the inaugural chair of the Cybersecurity Center at the Data Science Institute. She holds a BS in Math and Computer Science from Bar-Ilan University, an MS in Computer Science from the Weizmann Institute of Science, and a PhD in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Columbia, she worked as a research scientist at AT&T Labs Research.
Her primary research interests are in cryptography and its connections to complexity theory, systems security, and machine learning. She has worked on various areas including secure computation, private database access, black-box separations, non-malleable codes, and trustworthy ML. Her work on evaluating and defending implementations against side channel attacks received the 2024 IACR Test-of-Time Award for lasting impact on cryptographic theory and practice, and her work on the complexity of adversarial noise models in data poisoning attacks received the Best Paper Award at SODA 2026.
Malkin is an IACR (International Association for Cryptologic Research) Fellow, and a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the Columbia University Presidential Teaching Award, and faculty awards from JP Morgan, IBM, Amazon, and Google. She has chaired leading conferences including CRYPTO, the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), and the Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC), and currently chairs the steering committee for TCC.
Tal Malkin is married to Erich Nahum and they have two children and two cats.
