Prateek Mittal

2025 National Award Finalist — Faculty

Prateek Mittal

Current Position:
Professor

Institution:
Princeton University

Discipline:
Computer Science

Recognized for: Pioneering work powering the security and privacy of the internet, generating over 2.5 billion cryptographic certificates and securing more than 350 million websites.

Areas of Research Interest and Expertise:
Internet Security and Privacy, AI Security and Privacy

Previous Positions:

B.Tech, Indian Institute of Technology at Guwahati, India
MS, University of Ilinois at Urbana-Champaign (Advisor: Nikita Borisov)
PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Advisor: Nikita Borisov)
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, Berkley (Advisor: Dawn Song)
Assistant Professor, Princeton University
Associate Professor, Princeton University
Professor, Princeton University

Research Summary:

In our increasingly digitized world, the privacy and security of the information we transmit online is of paramount importance. Research being led by computer scientist Prateek Mittal, PhD, seeks to ensure that our data is safeguarded against those who would try and take it for their own benefit. By discovering and fixing security vulnerabilities in well-known protocols, Mittal has already transformed the methods being used to secure our internet data – leading to hundreds of millions of websites, both private and government-run alike, being secured.

“Emerging technologies hold the power to revolutionize our world —but they also introduce unprecedented challenges to information security and privacy. I seek to understand and re-imagine the design of computing systems to be inherently secure and privacy-preserving.  To truly safeguard our society, we must bridge the gap between fundamental research and real-world deployment, ensuring that our technological future is responsibly built.”

Key Publications:

  1. H. Birge-Lee, L. Wang, D. McCarney, R. Shoemaker, J. Rexford, P. Mittal.  Experiences Deploying Multi-Vantage-Point Domain Validation at Let’s Encrypt. USENIX Security Symposium, 2021.
  2. H. Birge-Lee, Y. Sun, A. Edmundson, J. Rexford, P. Mittal. Bamboozling Certificate Authorities with BGP. USENIX Security Symposium, 2021.
  3. A.N. Bhagoji, D. Cullina, P. Mittal. Lower Bounds on Adversarial Robustness from Optimal Transport. Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2019.
  4. X. Qi, Y. Zeng, T. Xie, P. Chen, R. Jia, P. Mittal, P. Henderson. Fine-tuning Aligned Language Models Compromises Safety, Even When Users Do Not Intend To!, International Conference on Learning Representations, 2014.

Other Honors:

2025 Outstanding Paper Award, International Conference on Learning Representations
2025 ACM Distinguished Member, Association for Computing Machinery
2025 Distinguished Alumni Award, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati
2024 Young Alumni Achievement Award, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
2024 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, Association for Computing Machinery
2018 Young Investigator Prize (YIP), Army Research Organization
2018 Young Investigator Award (YIP), Office of Naval Research
2016 NSF CAREER Award, National Science Foundation

In the Media:

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