Puneet Gill

I am a PhD student in Computer Engineering at University of Waterloo. In my research, I work on security and privacy of computer systems.

I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Mahesh Tripunitara. In my master's I was advised by Prof. Mahesh Tripunitara and Prof. Werner Dietl. Before graduate school, I completed by undergraduate studies in Electrical Engineering at University of Waterloo. Prior to graduate school, I interned at Amazon in the search experience team and also worked there for 1 year contributing to the labor scheduling team.

Outside of work, I enjoy reading, photography and running.

Email  /  CV  /  LinkedIn  /  Google Scholar

Research

My research interests lie in computer security, algorithms and program analysis.

In my undergraduate studies, I had the opportunity to work with Prof. Mahesh Tripunitara on a research project of understanding the semantics of access control lists in open source implementation of lightweight directory access protocol. I contributed to the project by coming up with an efficient way to determining the access control matrix, comparing it with the existing solutions.

News

Paper with Boyun Zhang, Nelu Mihai and Mahesh Tripunitara was awarded "Best Student Paper" at the Second International Symposium on Emerging Information Security and Applications (EISA), 2021.

Papers

Finding Unchecked Low-Level Calls with Zero False Positives and Negatives in Ethereum Smart Contracts
Puneet Gill, Indrani Ray, Alireza Lotfi Takami and Mahesh Tripunitara
International Symposium on Foundations & Practice of Security, 2022. (To Appear)

Least-Privilege Calls to Amazon Web Services
Puneet Gill, Werner Dietl, Mahesh Tripunitara
IEEE Transactions of Dependable and Secure Computing, 2022.
Link | PDF

Granularity and Usability in Authorization Policies
Boyun Zhang, Puneet Gill, Nelu Mihai, Mahesh Tripunitara
Emerging Information Security and Applications (EISA), 2021.
Link | PDF

Projects

Solving Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem Using Parallelized Pollard's Rho and Lambda Methods

There are many applications of collision search algorithms in cryptanalysis. These may involve searching the space of keys, plaintext or ciphertext. For public key cryptosystems, they may be aimed at solving difficult mathematical problems such as computing factorization and discrete logarithms. In the paper, Parallel Collision Search with Cryptanalytic Applications, Oorschot and Weiner present an efficient method to parallelize Pollard's rho and lambda methods for computing discrete logarithms in cyclic groups. This analysis can also be extended to efficiently computing the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem over a finite field Ζp
Report | Shank's Algorithm | Pollard's Rho Method | Pollard's Lambda Method

Industry
Canada

Department of National Defence, Canada
May 2020 - Aug 2020

Trained machine learning models to detect malicious TLS certificates.
Implemented a TLS client/server and analyzed the network traffic for TLS connections using Wireshark.

amazon

Amazon - Labor Scheduling
Sept 2017 - Aug 2018

Worked in the flexible labor scheduling team, responsible for working on an integer linear programming problem constituting developing weekly schedules for over 30000 associates accross the globe.

Amazon (Intern) - Search Experience
Sept 2016 - Dec 2016

Worked on implementing a recommendation strategy service for Amazon's search results.

Courses
pacman

ECE 604 Stochastic Processes - Fall 2018

CO 687 Applied Cryptography - Winter 2019

ECE 653 Software Testing, Quality Assurance, and Maintenance - Spring 2019

CS 666 Design and Analysis of Algorithms - Fall 2019

CO 602 Fundamentals of Optimization - Fall 2020

CO 738 Probabilistic Methods in Discrete Mathematics - Spring 2021 (Audit)

CS 747 Software Verification using Proof Assistants - Winter 2022

(TA) ECE 351 Compilers - Winter 2019

(TA) ECE 606 Algorithms - Fall 2019, Fall 2021

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