Varun Madathil

Hi! I am Varun Madathil, a postdoctoral associate at Yale University, hosted by Dr. Charalampos (Babis) Papamanthou.

I was incredibly fortunate to be advised by Dr. Alessandra Scafuro during my time as a Ph.D. student in the Wolfpack Privacy and Research Lab at North Carolina State University. During my Ph.D. I had the opportunity to visit Dr. Foteini Baldimtsi at George Mason University in 2018, Dr. Markulf Kohlweiss at University of Edinburgh in 2019, Dr. Pedro-Moreno Sanchez in 2021 and more recently Dr. Aniket Kate in 2024 at Purdue University.

Prior to my Ph.D. I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from BITS Pilani in 2016.

I am interested in cryptography. More specifically, I am interested in anonymity and privacy-preserving multiparty protocols and their applications to real-world systems like blockchains. Find my latest resume here

Reach me at varun.madathil@yale.edu

Publications

(authors are ordered alphabetically)

• Jager: Automated Telephone Call Traceback. David Adei, Varun Madathil, Sathvik Prasad, Bradley Reaves, Alessandra Scafuro. CCS 2024 (Distinguished Paper Award)

• HomeRun: High-efficiency Oblivious Message Retrieval, Unrestricted. Yanxue Jia, Varun Madathil, Aniket Kate. CCS 2024

• Cryptographic Oracle-Based Conditional Payments. Varun Madathil, Sri AravindaKrishnan Thyagarajan, Dimitrios Vasilopoulos, Giulio Malavolta, Lloyd Fournier, Pedro Moreno-Sanchez. NDSS 2023

• Preserving Buyer-Privacy in Decentralized Supply Chain Marketplaces. Varun Madathil, Alessandra Scafuro, Kemafor Anyanwu, Sen Qiao, Akash Pateria, and Binil Starly. CBT 2022

• Private Signaling. Varun Madathil, Alessandra Scafuro, Istvan Andras Seres, Omer Shlomovits and Denis Varlakov. USENIX 2022 (Distinguished Paper Award)

• From Privacy-Only to Simulatable OT: Black-Box, Round-Optimal, Information-theoretic. Varun Madathil, Chris Orsini, Alessandra Scafuro, and Daniele Venturi. ITC 2022

• Anonymous Device Authorization for Cellular Networks. Abida Haque, Varun Madathil, Brad Reaves, Alessandra Scafuro. WiSec 2021

• On the anonymity guarantees of anonymous proof-of-stake protocols. Markulf Kohlweiss, Varun Madathil, Kartik Nayak and Alessandra Scafuro. S&P 2021

• Anonymous Lottery in the Proof-of-Stake Setting. Foteini Baldimtsi, Varun Madathil, Alessandra Scafuro, Linfeng Zhou. CSF 2020.

Manuscripts

• PriFHEte: : Achieving Full-Privacy in Account-based Cryptocurrencies is Possible. Varun Madathil, Alessandra Scafuro.

• Scalable Private Signaling. Sashidhar Jakkamsetti, Zeyu Liu, and Varun Madathil.

Service

I am or will serve in the program committee for the following conferences: CCS 2025, Financial Crypto 2025, Oakland S&P 2025