Baffle Advisor Mihir Bellare Wins the Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography

Award Honors Bellare’s Contributions to Practice-Oriented, Provable Approach to Security

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – January 24, 2019 – Baffle, Inc., an advanced data protection company, today announced that Mihir Bellare, Chief Cryptography Advisor at Baffle, Inc., has been recognized as the recipient of the 2019 Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography. Bellare, an advisor at Baffle since 2017, was acknowledged “for outstanding contributions to the design and analysis of real-world cryptography, including the development of the random oracle model, modes-of-operation, HMAC, and formal models of key exchange.”

Announced at the 2019 Real-World Crypto Conference in San Jose, Calif., the Levchin Prize honors researchers and innovators who have made significant contributions to the practice of cryptography in real-world systems.

“Privacy and security are critically important to the future of the internet and to our connected lives,” said Mihir Bellare, chief cryptography advisor, Baffle, Inc. “That is why my cryptography research has focused so heavily on practice-oriented provable security, as this is crucial to ensuring the security of data at-rest, in memory and in use. I thank the conference steering committee for this tremendous honor,” said Bellare.

Bellare is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where his research includes areas such as provable security and interactive and probabilistically checkable proofs. He obtained his BS degree at Caltech and his PhD at MIT. He is a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the IACR and a recipient of the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award. He has an h-index of 100 and over 50,000 citations as per Google Scholar. Cryptographic algorithms that he has co-developed and are widely used in practice include HMAC, RSA-OAEP, RSA-PSS and DHIES.

“We congratulate Mihir on being awarded the Max Levchin Prize. At Baffle, our focus has always been on finding operationally pragmatic approaches to securing data. It is an honor to have someone of Mihir’s calibre to guide and advise us in our journey to develop solutions that can be deployed at scale in today’s enterprise and cloud environments with minimal application impact,” said Ameesh Divatia, CEO and co-founder, Baffle, Inc.

In 2018, Baffle released the first to market solution for secure computation of data in use with any application – whether it’s custom, hosted or software as a service (SaaS). The company was also awarded a patent for its innovative and unique approach to processing data on untrusted computers

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About Baffle

Baffle, the application data protection company, prevents data breaches by securing the end-to-end data access model for applications and databases. Using this method, the technology protects against some of the most recent high-profile attacks and vulnerabilities – including Spectre and Meltdown. With its patented technology, Baffle is the only company that can enable encryption of data at rest, in use, in memory and in the search index without impacting the application using AES encryption. Baffle is also the first company to enable secure data processing on a commercial application and database to guarantee data protection. Baffle has raised $10.5 million of financing; its investors include True Ventures, Envision Ventures, ServiceNow Ventures [NYSE: NOW], Thomvest Ventures, Engineering Capital, and Industry Ventures.

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Tommy Owens
Look Left Marketing
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