mariana gama

I am currently a postdoc at COSIC, KU Leuven, where I also completed my PhD in 2025 under the supervision of Nigel Smart and Svetla Nikova. My research interests revolve around the applications and practical aspects of multi-party computation, as well as the interactions between MPC and other PETs, namely zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption.

From March to August 2023, I did a research internship at Nokia Bell Labs in Antwerp, where I worked on delegating the computation of zero-knowledge proofs.

From July 2020 to May 2023, I was involved in the SNIPPET project, where I worked on the design of privacy-preserving market mechanisms for the p2p electricity market using multi-party computation.

Previously, I was a research assistant at Instituto de Telecomunicações, working on quantum primitives for MPC protocols. Before that, I received my MSc in Applied Mathematics and my BSc in Physics from Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal.

Some projects I worked on:

Verifiable FHE decryption: C implementation of the lattice-based ZK proof of correct FHE decryption described in Blind zkSNARKs. We leveraged basic primitives provided in the LaZer library for lattice-based zero-knowledge proofs and thoroughly extended it to construct our proof of decryption for BFV and GBFV.

Relay-based MPC system for realistic networks: A rust implementation of the MPC protocol described in this paper. The communication network, where the MPC parties communicate through a few central relay nodes, was also implemented from scratch and employs the gRPC remote-procedure-call framework for the party-relay interaction.

FHE-based Private Set Intersection: A C++ implementation of the PSI protocol described in this paper. Besides the SEAL-based implementation, there is also a version of the protocol with nearly constant communication implemented in HElib.

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