Cryptography Research Group

Seny is head of research at MongoDB. He has worked extensively on the design and cryptanalysis of encrypted search algorithms, which are efficient algorithms for searching on end-to-end encrypted data. His work first showed how to search on encrypted data in optimal time, how to formalize the security of searchable symmetric encryption (SSE), how to optimally search on dynamic encrypted data, and how to cryptanalyze property-preserving encryption. He maintains interests in various aspects of theory and systems, including applied and theoretical cryptography, data structures and algorithms, and technology policy.

Before joining MongoDB, Seny was an associate professor of computer science at Brown University. Before that, he was a research scientist at Microsoft Research. In 2017, he co-founded Aroki Systems and served as its chief scientist until its acquisition by MongoDB. He has been appointed to two National Academies of Sciences committees on encryption and surveillance and has provided testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee and to the Committee on Space, Science, and Technology. He has given keynotes at the IACR’s Annual International Cryptology Conference (CRYPTO), the ACM’s Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), and the ACM’s Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT). In 2022, Seny and his collaborators won the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security’s (CCS) Test-of-Time Award for their work on dynamic searchable symmetric encryption.

Seny Kamara’s page

Seny Kamara's Scholar profile

Tarik manages the Cryptography Research Group at MongoDB. Prior to joining MongoDB, he was a co-founder and chief technology officer at Aroki Systems (acquired by MongoDB) and before that, he was a visiting scientist and a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University in the Encrypted Systems Lab (ESL). His research is in the area of cryptography and computer security, with a focus on encrypted search. He works primarily on the design and cryptanalysis of encrypted search algorithms that offer different efficiency, security, and expressiveness trade-offs. His work introduced the first worst-case sublinear Boolean searchable symmetric encryption scheme, the first structured encryption-based encrypted relational database, the notion of leakage suppression along with the first volume-hiding structured encryption schemes, and the first volumetric leakage attacks against exact keyword search.

Tarik served on the organizing committee of the first workshop on the Theory and Practice of Encrypted Search (TPES) as well as ICERM’s workshop on encrypted search. He has also served on the program committees of IACR’s Annual International Cryptology Conference (CRYPTO), IACR’s Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptology (Eurocrypt), and the ACM’s Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS).

Andrew graduated from Brown University with a B.S. in applied mathematics and an M.S in computer science in 2020. Prior to MongoDB, he was a research assistant in the Encrypted Systems Lab at Brown University, as well as a research assistant at Cylab at Carnegie Mellon University.

His research focuses on the practical design of cryptographic protocols and their application to privacy-preserving technologies. His prior work spans areas such as Oblivious RAM (ORAM) and Private Information Retrieval (PIR), and their applications to solve interesting real-world problems.