Zachary DeStefano

Zachary DeStefano

I am a 4th year Computer Science Ph.D. candidate at New York University, advised by Michael Walfish, doing research at the intersection of Systems, Security, and Formal Methods.

I am particularly interested in zero-knowledge proofs, secure systems, verifiable computation, and recreational mathematics.

I can be contacted by email at zd2131 (at) nyu (dot) edu.

Recent publications

NOPE: Strengthening domain authentication with succinct proofs
Zachary DeStefano, Jeff J. Ma, Joseph Bonneau, and Michael Walfish
30th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
SOSP 2024, Austin, TX, November 2024.

Zombie: Middleboxes that Don’t Snoop
Collin Zhang, Zachary DeStefano, Arasu Arun, Joseph Bonneau, Paul Grubbs, and Michael Walfish
21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
NSDI 2024, Santa Clara, CA, April 2024. Talk Video

Less is more: refinement proofs for probabilistic proofs
Kunming Jiang, Devora Chait-Roth, Zachary DeStefano, Michael Walfish, and Thomas Wies
44th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
Oakland 2023, San Francisco, CA, May 2023.

Older research

zkQMC: Zero-Knowledge Proofs For (Some) Probabilistic Computations Using Quasi-Randomness
Zachary DeStefano, Dani Barrack, and Michael Dixon
Preprint, Cryptology ePrint Archive, 2022.

Multicolor Ramsey numbers for Berge cycles
Zachary DeStefano, Hannah Mahon, Frank Simutis, and Michael Tait
Electronic Journal of Combinatorics 29(4), 2022.

Privacy Preserving, Distributed, and Verifiable Machine Learning for COVID-19 Identification using ZKPs
Zachary DeStefano and Michael Dixon
Chesapeake Large-Scale Analytics Conference
Student Flash Talk, CLSAC 2020, Virtual, October 2020.

Teaching

Head Teaching Assistant
Undergraduate Operating Systems,
New York University, Spring 2023.

Teaching Assistant and Recitation Leader
Masters Fundamental Algorithms,
New York University, Fall 2022.

Teaching Assistant
Freshman Computer Science Enrichment,
Villanova University, Fall 2020.

Teaching Assistant and Lecturer
Undergraduate Computer Science Statistics,
Villanova University, Spring 2019.