We love celebrating our co-founder and groundbreaking cryptographer Professor Raluca Ada Popa. She at the heart of the deep science that undergirds PreVeil’s industry-leading encryption. Now she’s on the cover of Berkeley ENGINEER Magazine for her work in “reinventing cybersecurity.”
 
“Decryption in her software works like nuclear launch codes, adding another layer of security against inadvertent leaks and human frailties,” writes Berkeley ENGINEER. “To decrypt a computation result, all the parts must come together, a system that guards against even multiple points of corruption or error in the process.”
 
Raluca is no stranger to top accolades. The UC Berkeley assistant professor in electrical engineering and computer sciences is lauded on both coasts for her work in security and advanced cryptography. In 2019 she was named to MIT Technology Review’s “35 Innovators under 35.” She’s been honored with the George M. Sprowls Award for best MIT Computer Science doctoral thesis, a Google PhD Fellowship, and the Intel Early Career Faculty Honor Award.
 
The science powering PreVeil’s end-to-end encryption flows in no small measure from her research and insights into securing data regardless of how it is transmitted. Ultimate data security is the essence of her groundbreaking work. Her breakthrough insights have allowed PreVeil to offer users ultra-secure email and file sharing that is light footprint, highly economical, and super easy to deploy and use.
 
Her current focus is on giving organizations a way to share and compute on their sensitive data without ever decrypting it. “Essentially it’s sharing without showing,” she tells the magazine. “My work makes it practical.”
 
“Raluca Ada Popa also believes that society can reap great benefits from private data if only we can learn how to use it securely,” says the Berkeley cover story.
 
Berkeley ENGINEER writes:
 

Popa’s company PreVeil makes this Berkeley-developed technology available for email and file sharing – applications that perform like Gmail and Dropbox. She has customers in critical fields like aerospace, defense and biotechnology.
 
But Popa’s ambitions go beyond what her research and company can do alone. She is working on MC2 , an open-source version of her lab’s secure collaborative platform that is accessible to non-technical users. Potential applications appear to be vast.
 
“People come to us from financial institutions, big internet companies, nuclear physics, the government, medical institutions… we are creating a platform that anyone can use,” she says. “You don’t have to know cryptography or fancy engineering.”

 
We are very proud of Raluca Ada Popa and the deep insight she brings to PreVeil and to all her work. PreVeil joins the UC Berkeley computer science community in saluting our trailblazing co-founder.


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