NJIT Professor Awarded Prestigious DARPA Fellowship

Kurt Rohloff, a professor of computer science at NJIT’s Ying Wu College of Computing, has been awarded the prestigious DARPA Director’s Fellowship from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The $500,000 grant that comes with the Fellowship will be used to continue to advance deployability, usability and performance of open-source libraries, such as the open-source PALISADE homomorphic encryption library developed by Rohloff and his collaborators in academia and the U.S. defense industry.

This enables organizations to protect their data so that computations may be performed on the data in an encrypted form. Keeping the data encrypted provides an extra layer of protection for companies, allowing them to conceal confidential or proprietary information while allowing certified users to perform data science, run analytics or crunch numbers on the data without directly accessing it. 

The DARPA Director’s Fellowship is given only to individuals who have previously received the agency’s Young Faculty Award and whose subsequent work has produced technology that has shown significant impact. Rohloff participated in an award ceremony at DARPA’s headquarters in Arlington, Va.

Rohloff said PALISADE has showed early promise to the Department of Defense (DoD) because it relates to very large legacy software components found in many U.S. DoD operational systems, such as those on aircraft or ships. These systems, having been developed decades ago when security was not an issue, are today particularly vulnerable to modern security problems. 

"That Kurt was awarded the prestigious Director's Fellowship is a testament to the high quality of his research and its relevance to the DARPA mission. Kurt’s work will have an impact on very large, complex legacy DoD computing systems making them more secure and private,” said Dr. Mike Fiddy, DARPA’s Young Faculty Award program manager. 

DARPA is the blue-sky research wing of the U.S. Department of Defense and has played a key role in the development of major life-changing technologies such as the Internet, email and GPS.

An engineer by training, Rohloff is a pioneer in the field of cryptography. He first became interested in homomorphic encryption while working in the U.S. defense industry supported by DARPA. It was there that he started to create PALISADE.

Rohloff said his NJIT colleagues, Associate Research Professor Yuriy Polyakov and Senior Lecturer Gerard Ryan, have played a key role in PALISADE’s success. 

“The strong collaboration between defense industry partners, researchers at other universities such as MIT and the folks here at NJIT has been a recipe for success,” Rohloff said.

Craig Gotsman, Dean of the Ying Wu College of Computing, said Rohloff’s work is a prime example of the cutting-edge research begin done at NJIT, which has significant academic value and also produces results that impact the real-world outside of the lab or the classroom. 

In addition to his research at NJIT, Rohloff is a co-founder of Duality Technologies, a startup launched in 2016 that commercializes homomorphic encryption technology.