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Fengrun (Freya) Liu

(she/her)

My Chinese name, Fengrun, is pronounced approximately as /fəŋ rʊn/.
I also go by Freya.

About

I am a first-year PhD student at CMU, advised by Prof. Wenting Zheng. My research interests lie broadly in applied cryptography. I am particularly passionate about the potential of cryptography to create decentralized and verifiable applications, including in blockchain and machine learning. I was a research intern at Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute, where I had the privilege of being advised by Prof. Yu Yu.

Here is my curriculum vitae (CV), updated as of 2024/11/27. You can reach me by email.

Email: or fengrunl@andrew.cmu.edu

selfie
Publications

Scalable Multi-party Computation Protocols for Machine Learning in the Honest-Majority Setting [ paper ] [ code ] [ video ]
Fengrun Liu, Xiang Xie, Yu Yu
USENIX Security 2024 (Accepted in 09/2023)

HasteBoots: Proving FHE Bootstrapping in Seconds [ paper ] [ slides ] [ video* ]
Fengrun Liu, Haofei Liang, Tianyu Zhang, Yuncong Hu, Xiang Xie, Haisheng Tan, Yu Yu
(In submission)
Passcode for the video: @u61w1Y@
*My pace might be a bit slow, so I recommend adjusting the playback speed to 1.5-2x for a smoother experience.

Research Experience

1. MPC Protocols Tailored for Privacy-preserving Machine Learning (PPML)
2. Generate Publicly Verifiable SNARGs for FHE Operations
     This work is in submission.
Blog Series
Foundations of Cryptography (MIT 6.875) [blog link] en Lecture 1 - Lecture 17 [course link] by Vinod Vaikuntanathan
Zero Knowledge Proofs MOOC [blog link] en Lecture 4 - Lecture 7 [course link] by Dan Boneh, Shafi Goldwasser, Dawn Song,
Justin Thaler and Yupeng Zhang
Cryptography Course (on Coursera) [blog link] zh-CN Lecture 1 - Lecture 8 [course link] by Dan Boneh
MPC Lectures [blog link] zh-CN Lecture 1 - Lecture 3 [course link] by Mike Rosulek
Machine Learning [blog link] zh-CN Lecture 1 - Lecture 14 [course link] by Hung-yi Lee
Some Past Presentations
2025-01 [slides] en (Sumcheck Builders Seminars) Topic: HasteBoots: Proving FHE Bootstrapping in Seconds ref: video
2024-10 [slides] zh-CN (Ant Group’s SecretFlow Live) Topic: Scalable and Efficient MPC for ML ref: paper
2024-08 [slides] en (USENIX Security '24') Topic: Scalable Multi-Party Computation Protocols for Machine Learning in the Honest-Majority Setting ref: paper
2024-06 [slides] en (J.P. Morgan's AlgoCRYPT Seminar) Topic: Scalable and Efficient MPC for ML ref: paper
2023-09 [slides] en Topic: Spartan's sparse PCS and Lookup Singularity with Lasso ref: Lasso
2023-09 [slides] en Topic: Plookup and Batch-column Lookup (logUp) ref: plookup, logUp
2023-08 [slides] en Topic: Sumcheck for FFT ref: zkCNN
2022-05 [slides] zh-CN Undergraduate Graduation Defense
2021-04 [slides] en Topic: Fuzzing Technologies (AFL++) ref: AFL++