Prateek Mittal has been named a distinguished member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions to privacy-preserving and secure systems.
Mittal, professor of electrical and computer engineering, has designed and developed systems that help safeguard internet users as well as artificial intelligence-based technologies, drawing on techniques from data science, network science and applied cryptography. He and colleagues identified vulnerabilities in widely used encryption protocols and developed a new approach for how web browsers and operating systems verify a website’s identity. The method enables verification from multiple vantage points on the internet. It was adopted by global organizations last year as a universal security standard, helping protect every single web connection worldwide. Mittal’s research group has also shaped our understanding of the safety of machine learning and artificial intelligence, uncovering new privacy and security risks, as well as developing secure and private learning mechanisms. Innovations by Mittal and his collaborators have helped protect the safety of large language models and machine learning platforms deployed by OpenAI and Google.
The ACM Distinguished Member program recognizes ACM members with at least 15 years of professional experience whose accomplishments have significantly impacted the computing field. As the world’s largest computing organization, ACM aims to connect computing educators, researchers and professionals to address the field’s challenges.
Mittal joined Princeton University in 2013. He won the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 2024, and has won numerous awards from industry including faculty research awards from OpenAI, Google, IBM, Intel, Facebook, Cisco and Siemens, as well from government entities including the Office of Naval Research’s Young Investigator Award, the Army Research Organization’s Young Investigator Prize, and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He has collaborated with nonprofits including Let’s Encrypt, the Tor Project, and the Open Technology Foundation. Mittal is an associated faculty member in the department of computer science and Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, where he served as interim director from 2022 to 2023.
