Cryptography

The Cryptography team at Microsoft Research consists of researchers and engineers who make technology more secure, more trustworthy, and more private for every person and organization. Our focus is on cryptography, security, and privacy problems that are in the strategic path for Microsoft, our products and services, and our customers. Broader societal impact to improve trust and safety, to guarantee privacy, and to increase security is also important to us. We believe cryptographic tools and techniques should be made available and easy to use for everyone.

We choose research problems with impact across one or more dimensions:

1. Core cryptography, cross-cutting work with broad impact.
2. Cryptography for industry, focused on problems that Microsoft, the tech industry, and/or our business customers face.
3. Cryptography for society, working on problems that may not connect to an existing Microsoft business but where cryptography and cryptographic technology can contribute to solutions.
4. An emerging fourth dimension is problems for cryptography that arise from continued advances in AI.

Almost all of our research is public, and we regularly publish in top conferences in the field. We collaborate with researchers and students in academia and host interns every year through Microsoft’s internship program. We build production-quality software libraries and release them under open-source licenses (typically MIT).

We host a bi-weekly Microsoft-internal Cryptography Talk Series, inviting professors, post-doc researchers, PhD students, industry researchers, and other experts to share their work. Some of these talks are made public on the Microsoft Research YouTube channel (playlist link (opens in new tab)).