Photo of Paul S. Lou

Paul S. Lou

Postdoctoral Researcher · paul [DOT] lou [AT] unibocconi [DOT] it

About

Hi! I'm Paul. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at Bocconi University working with Alon Rosen. I'm interested broadly in cryptography. My primary research goal is understanding and using new sources of hardness to construct fundamental cryptographic primitives such as public-key encryption. I also actively work on zero-knowledge proof systems, information-theoretic cryptography, and quantum algorithms.

I completed my Ph.D. at UCLA under the kind and sage guidance of Amit Sahai. Prior to that, I finished my undergraduate degrees majoring in computer science, mathematics, and statistics at the University of Pennsylvania where I was fortunate to work with Nadia Heninger.

Here's a link to my Ph.D. dissertation (with slides).

New & News

Publications

Authors listed alphabetically.

  1. Expanders Meet Reed-Muller: Easy Instances of Noisy k-XOR

    Jarosław Błasiok, Paul Lou, Alon Rosen, Madhu Sudan

    FOCS 2026

  2. Quantum Advantage via Solving Multivariate Polynomials

    Pierre Briaud, Itai Dinur, Riddhi Ghosal, Aayush Jain, Paul Lou, Amit Sahai

    SODA 2026

    Slides (UT Austin, Dec. 2025)
  3. Fully Anonymous Secret Sharing

    Allison Bishop, Matthew Green, Abhishek Jain, Yuval Ishai, Paul Lou

    Crypto 2025

    Slides (Crypto 2025 & Stanford, Sep. 2025)
  4. Post-Quantum PKE from Unstructured Noisy Linear Algebraic Assumptions: Beyond LWE and Alekhnovich's LPN

    Riddhi Ghosal, Aayush Jain, Paul Lou, Amit Sahai, Neekon Vafa

    Eurocrypt 2025

    Part of Ph.D. Defense Slides (UCLA, May 2025)
  5. Witness Semantic Security

    Paul Lou, Nathan Manohar, Amit Sahai

    Eurocrypt 2024

    Slides (Eurocrypt 2024)
  6. Computational Wiretap Coding from Indistinguishability Obfuscation

    Yuval Ishai, Aayush Jain, Paul Lou, Amit Sahai, Mark Zhandry

    Crypto 2023

    Slides (Crypto 2023 & ITC 2024)
  7. Hard Languages in NP∩coNP and NIZK Proofs from Unstructured Hardness

    Riddhi Ghosal, Yuval Ishai, Alexis Korb, Eyal Kushilevitz, Paul Lou, Amit Sahai

    STOC 2023

    Slides (CMU, Apr. 2024)
  8. Polynomial-Time Cryptanalysis of the Subspace Flooding Assumption for Post-Quantum iO

    Aayush Jain, Rachel Lin, Paul Lou, Amit Sahai

    Eurocrypt 2023

    Slides (Eurocrypt 2023)
  9. Efficient NIZKs from LWE via Polynomial Reconstruction and "MPC in the Head"

    Riddhi Ghosal, Paul Lou, Amit Sahai

    Asiacrypt 2022

    Slides (Asiacrypt 2022)
  10. Beyond the Csiszár-Korner Bound: Best-Possible Wiretap Coding via Obfuscation

    Yuval Ishai, Alexis Korb, Paul Lou, Amit Sahai

    Crypto 2022 — invited to Journal of Cryptology

    Slides (UCLA Oral Qualifying Exam, Nov. 2023)
  11. Relinearization Attack on LPN over Large Fields

    Paul Lou, Amit Sahai, Varun Sivashankar

    CFAIL 2022 (affiliated workshop, Crypto 2022) — invited to The Computer Journal

    Slides (CFAIL 2022)
  12. Post-Quantum RSA

    Daniel J. Bernstein, Nadia Heninger, Paul Lou, Luke Valenta

    PQCrypto 2017

    press: Why Quantum Computers Might Not Break Cryptography — Quanta Magazine

Preprints

Service

Program Committee
Asiacrypt 2026, CCS 2026, Oakland 2023 Posters.
Reviewer
Journal of Cryptology, Designs, Codes and Cryptography.
External Reviewer
Crypto (2022, 2025, 2026), Eurocrypt (2024, 2025, 2026), STOC (2024, 2025, 2026), TCC (2023, 2024, 2025), IEEE S&P (2024), Asiacrypt (2024).

Teaching