Roopa Vishwanathan

Assistant Professor
Pronouns: she/her
Dept. of Computer Science
New Mexico State University (NMSU)
1290 Frenger Mall
Las Cruces, NM 88003
Contact e-mail: roopav at nmsu.edu

Location and Hours

Office: Science Hall 142
Office hours for Fall'23: Tue/Thurs 3:30-4:30 pm, or by appointment

Teaching

Fall'23:
CS 278/465: Discrete Math, Tue/Thurs 10:30-11:45 am, SH 102
CS 380/525: Introduction to Cryptography, Tue/Thurs 1:00-2:15 pm, SH 115

Research Interests

I'm interested broadly in security, privacy, and applied cryptography. Of late, I've been investigating applied cryptography in the context of blockchain-based applications, such as secure auditing, doing blockchain rewrites, and designing access control mechanisms for blockchains. I'm currently working in the exciting area of building secure and efficient Layer-2 protocols such as payment channel networks, state channels and rollups. My past work was about secure cryptographic protocol design, such as verifiable escrow, fair exchange, attribute-based signatures, etc.

I'm always looking for new students! If you're an NMSU student and are interested in security, privacy, and/or cryptography (and can write decent code), please feel free to come talk to me, or drop me an email. We also have openings for undergrads!

My research has been in the past or is currently funded by the NSF, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the Dept. of Energy (DoE). Thank you to the funding agencies for their support!


Students

I'm fortunate to work with the following students:
  • Current: Kartick Kolachala (PhD), Mohammed Ababneh (PhD), Matheen Basha Shaik (PhD)
  • Past: Lalitha Muthu Subramanian (MS), Guruprasad Eswaraiah (MS), Douglas Nedza (BS)
  • Selected recent publications

    Older papers

    About me

    Before I joined NMSU, I was an Assistant Professor from 2014-2017 at SUNY Polytechnic in Utica, NY. Before that I was a Postdoc in UNC Greensboro from 2011-2013, working with Steve Tate. I joined UNC Greensboro in July 2011 after completing my PhD at the University of North Texas's Department of Computer Science and Engineering in May 2011. At UNC Greensboro, I worked on this project. Downloadable source code and plugins related to the project can be found here Even before that, I received my BE in Computer Science and Engineering in 2003 from the University of Mumbai (Bombay).

    I was born and raised in the beautiful city of Mumbai (Bombay).

    Fun Links!


    Useful academic/research links