Web applications store more personal user data than ever before, and when that data is compromised by attackers, the consequences for affected users are severe. A recently developed web framework called Mylar aims to make secure web applications easier to build by encrypting all data in the user’s browser and allowing the servers to process encrypted data. This project aims to evaluate the developer experience while building applications using Mylar by building several applications with complex, realtime modes of user interaction. The implementations can then be analyzed to find common good design patterns, and added to the framework as new functionality to make building secure distributed web applications with Mylar an easy and intuitive experience for developers.

My first research was a two-year UROP at the MIT AgeLab, building a video and sensor data analysis platform. For three summers I interned as a distributed systems engineer at Palantir, Dropbox and Firebase. I designed and developed a high-throughput data caching system, a fault-tolerant push notification service, and a fault-tolerant data persistence and parallel query execution system for a distributed database.