Prof. Bhavana Kanukurthi

About

Bhavana Kanukurthi is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Automation at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) , Bangalore. A cryptographer, her research explores foundational questions in cryptography and its connections with fields such as coding theory, game theory, and usability.

Bhavana completed her doctoral studies at Boston University under the supervision of Professor Leonid Reyzin , a privilege for which she remains deeply grateful. Her dissertation received the Research Excellence Award from Boston University’s Department of Computer Science.

Media & Features

• IISc News: Women in Science – Prof. Bhavana Kanukurthi
• Kernel Feature: Building Unbreakable Codes

Recent Publications

• Anirban Chakrabarthi, Shreyas Gupta, Bhavana Kanukurthi, Girisha Shankar: Secure Fuzzy Deduplication: Definitions and Constructions. CCSW 2025.
• Chaya Ganesh, Bhavana Kanukurthi, Girisha Shankar: Secure Auctions in the Presence of Rational Adversaries. CCS 2022.
• Nishanth Chandran, Bhavana Kanukurthi, Sai Lakshmi Bhavana Obbattu, Sruthi Sekar: Short Leakage Resilient and Non-malleable Secret Sharing Schemes. CRYPTO (1) 2022.
• Divesh Aggarwal, Bhavana Kanukurthi, Sai Lakshmi Bhavana Obbattu, Maciej Obremski, Sruthi Sekar: Rate one-third non-malleable codes. STOC 2022.
• Nishanth Chandran, Bhavana Kanukurthi, Sai Lakshmi Bhavana Obbattu, Sruthi Sekar: Adaptive Extractors and Their Application to Leakage Resilient Secret Sharing. CRYPTO (3) 2021.
• Bhavana Kanukurthi, Sai Lakshmi Bhavana Obbattu, Sruthi Sekar: Four-State Non-malleable Codes with Explicit Constant Rate. J. Cryptol. 33(3) -- By Invitation from TCC 2017 .
• See full publication list on DBLP.

Students

Current Students

• V Arunachaleswaran (PhD, co-advised with Chaya Ganesh)
• Krishan Chakraborty (PhD)
• Kanad Chakravarti (PhD)
• Mullapudi Venkata Sai Srikantha (PhD)
• Kumar Aditya (MTech Research)

Graduated Students

Doctoral (PhD)

• Anirban Chakrabarthi
• Shreyas Gupta
• Girisha Shankar (Co-advised with Chaya Ganesh)
• Sruthi Sekar (Currently Assistant Professor, IIT Bombay)
• Sai Lakshmi Bhavana Obbattu (Currently Assistant Professor, IIT BHU)

MTech Research

• Siddharth Agarwal (Currently PhD student at University of Toronto, co-advised with Chaya Ganesh)
• Jenit Tomy (Currently PhD student at University of Saint Gallen)

Bachelor's and MTech

• Abhishek Shetty (Currently tenure-track faculty at GeorgiaTech, Atlanta)
• Rohit Chatterjee (BS and MS Mathematics, Currently Post-doc at NUS, co-advised with Himanshu Tyagi)
• Marilyn George (MTech, Currently Senior Research Scientist at MongoDB)
• Dinesh Sahu (MTech)
• Vandana (MTech)
• Kethavath Ugender (MTech)
• Prateek Somani (MTech project on ``Signal security", co-advised with Kanchi Gopinath)
• Cressida Hamlet (MTech, Currently Software Engineer at Google)
• Nithin Nath (MTech, Currently Software Engineer at Google)

Teaching

• Theoretical Foundations of Cryptography (Jan-Apr 2020. Past offerings: Jan-Apr 2019, Aug-Dec 2015-2017)
• Topics in Advanced Cryptography (Jan-Apr 2022. Past offerings: Jan-Apr 2018, Aug-Dec 2019)
• Randomness in Cryptography (Jan-Apr 2017, 2016)
• Cryptography (Jan-Apr 2015, Co-taught with Arpita Patra)
• Discrete Structures (Aug-Dec 2014, Co-taught with Arpita Patra)
• Discrete Mathematics (Online course for Microsoft's MEC initiative, co-taught with Nishanth Chandran and Neeraj Kayal)

Contact

Room 310/CSA/IISc
Phone: 080 2293 3561
Email: firstname@iisc.ac.in