Portrait of Tianyao Gu

Tianyao Gu

Second-year Ph.D. student, Electrical & Computer Engineering — Carnegie Mellon University
Advised by Prof. Elaine Shi Cryptography · Secure Computation

About

I am a second-year Ph.D. student in the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Elaine Shi. My research spans cryptography and privacy‑preserving systems, with a focus on Multi-Party Computation (MPC) and oblivious algorithms.

Education

Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA · Jan. 2025 – Present
Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering
Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship North America 2026
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA · Aug. 2022 – Dec. 2023
M.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering
UM–SJTU Dual Degree Program
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Ann Arbor, MI · Aug. 2020 – Apr. 2022
B.S.E. in Computer Science; Minor in Mathematics
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Shanghai, China · Sep. 2018 – Aug. 2022
B.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering; Minor in Global China Studies

Publications

Dishonest Majority Multi-Party Arithmetic Garbling with Constant Rate ePrint
To appear in CRYPTO 2026, Santa Barbara, CA — Aug. 2026
Tianyao Gu, Hanjun Li, Elaine Shi
Zebra: Arithmetic Garbled RAM for Large Words from DCR ePrint
EUROCRYPT 2026, Rome, Italy — May 2026
Tianyao Gu, Ashrujit Ghoshal, Elaine Shi
PicoGRAM: Practical Garbled RAM from Decisional Diffie‑Hellman ePrint
CRYPTO 2025, Santa Barbara, CA — Aug. 2025
Tianyao Gu, Afonso Tinoco, Sri Harish G Rajan, Elaine Shi
Flexway O‑Sort: Enclave‑Friendly and Optimal Oblivious Sorting ePrint
USENIX Security '25, Seattle, WA — Aug. 2025
Tianyao Gu, Yilei Wang, Afonso Tinoco, Bingnan Chen, Ke Yi, Elaine Shi
Distributed Synthesis of Differentially Private Tabular Datasets pdf
USENIX Security '26, Baltimore, MD — Aug. 2026
Yucheng Fu, Tianyao Gu, Elaine Shi, Tianhao Wang

Work Experience

Oblivious Labs Inc.
Pittsburgh, PA · Jan. 2024 – Jan. 2025
Co‑founder, Lead Research Engineer
  • Developed ORAM‑based privacy‑preserving key‑value store libraries in C++ and Rust for hardware enclaves (GitHub), achieving >20× performance improvement over existing implementations. Presented the work as an invited speaker at Devcon 2024 (talk).
  • Built a Garbled RAM (GRAM) library in C++ enabling constant‑round secure two‑party RAM computation; outperforming prior SOTA by 5.8× (GitHub).
  • Developed a privacy‑preserving oblivious sorting library in C++ achieving asymptotic optimality and a concrete >7.2× speedup over baselines in hardware enclaves (GitHub).
  • Collaborated with Signal (private contact discovery), Flashbots (ORAM for Ethereum), and 0xPARC (GRAM applications in blockchains).
Alipay · Ant Group (Alibaba Inc.)
Hangzhou, China · May 2021 – Aug. 2021
Full Stack Development Engineer Intern
  • Developed an automated system for alarm collection, analysis, and notification to improve AI reliability.
  • Initiated root‑cause analysis and emergency tracking features; performed trend analysis.
  • Contributed ≈17k lines of Java/JavaScript and improved backend management UIs.

Service & Outreach

Reviewer
Subreviewer of IACR Crypto 2026, Reviewer of Journal of Cryptology.
Co‑organizer
Co‑organize and coordinate seminar speakers, scheduling, and publicity for the CyLab crypto seminar series (website).

Contact

Email: gty0929@gmail.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tianyao-gu