Alexandra Henzinger
MIT
ahenz@csail.mit.edu
Bio
Alexandra Henzinger is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems (PDOS) group at MIT, advised by Henry Corrigan-Gibbs. Alexandra works on building computer systems that provably protect their users’ security and privacy. Much of her recent work has focused on private information retrieval, from designing cryptographic protocols to building a private search engine. Alexandra’s research is supported by an NSF GRFP fellowship and an MIT EECS Great Educators fellowship. Before coming to MIT, Alexandra graduated from Stanford with a B.S. with honors in Computer Science.
Areas of Research
- Computer Systems
Privacy in internet-scale systems
When we use today’s digital services, we entrust them with our data—search queries, chatbot logs, and much more. In doing so, we leave behind a digital footprint that reveals our entire lives, ranging from where we are to what we want. Users pay the price for this lack of privacy: if our trust in the service is misplaced, our sensitive information may be stored, stolen, sold, and ultimately used against us. My research builds computer systems that provide their users with rigorous guarantees of security and privacy—for example, a mathematical promise that no component or operator will ever learn user data. To this end, my work (1) develops efficient cryptographic tools to run private computations at scale, (2) combines them with techniques from data structures and machine learning to solve a range of private-information-retrieval tasks, and (3) designs a private web-search engine, that can search over hundreds of millions of webpages in seconds while learning nothing about what its users are searching for.