aasthakm.github.io

About

I am a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the CS Department, University of British Columbia.

I completed my PhD with Peter Druschel and Deepak Garg from Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS). Before my PhD, I worked at NetApp, Bengaluru (India), and completed my Bachelors in Computer Science from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani (India).

Research Interests

I am broadly interested in systems security, data privacy, operating systems, and distributed systems. I have worked on building systems that enable online services to comply with data privacy and usage policies, and prevent accidental disclosures due to bugs and misconfigurations. More recently, I have been working on solutions to ensure privacy in Cloud services in the face of side-channel disclosures. Currently, I am also exploring systems for effective contact tracing and epidemic risk notification in the context of COVID-19.

Publications

Listening to Bluetooth Beacons for Epidemic Risk Mitigation* [link]
Gilles Barthe, Roberta De Viti, Peter Druschel, Deepak Garg, Manuel Gomez-Rodriguez, Pierfrancesco Ingo, Heiner Kremer Matthew Lentz, Lars Lorch, Aastha Mehta, Bernhard Schölkopf
Under review. 2021.
*Authors listed in alphabetical order
PanCast: Listening to Bluetooth Beacons for Epidemic Risk Mitigation* [PDF]
Gilles Barthe, Roberta De Viti, Peter Druschel, Deepak Garg, Manuel Gomez-Rodriguez, Pierfrancesco Ingo, Matthew Lentz, Aastha Mehta, Bernhard Schölkopf
White Paper, 2020.
*Authors listed in alphabetical order
Ensuring Compliance with Data Privacy and Usage Policies in Online Services [PDF]
Aastha Mehta
PhD Thesis, 2020.
Pacer: Network Side-Channel Mitigation in the Cloud [PDF]
Aastha Mehta, Mohamed Alzayat, Roberta De Viti, Björn B. Brandenburg, Peter Druschel, Deepak Garg
Under Submission.
Qapla: Policy compliance for database-backed systems [PDF] [Code]
Aastha Mehta, Eslam Elnikety, Katura Harvey, Deepak Garg, Peter Druschel
USENIX Security Symposium, 2017.
Thoth: Comprehensive Policy Compliance in Data Retrieval Systems [PDF]
Eslam Elnikety, Aastha Mehta, Anjo Vahldiek-Oberwagner, Deepak Garg, Peter Druschel
USENIX Security Symposium, 2016.
Oblivious Multi-Party Machine Learning on Trusted Processors [PDF]
Olga Ohrimenko, Felix Schuster, Cédric Fournet, Aastha Mehta, Sebastian Nowozin, Kapil Vaswani, Manuel Costa
USENIX Security Symposium, 2016.
Guardat: Enforcing data policies at the storage layer [PDF]
Anjo Vahldiek, Eslam Elnikety, Aastha Mehta, Deepak Garg, Peter Druschel, Ansley Post, Rodrigo Rodriguez, Johannes Gehrke
European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), 2015.
HDFS Space Consolidation
Aastha Mehta, Deepti Banka, Kartheek Muthyala, Priya Sehgal, Ajay Bakre
Student Research Symposium, International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC), 2011.

Teaching

Co-Instructor Operating Systems (UdS Graduate Core Course)
Winter 2019
Teaching Assistant Information Flow Control Systems (UdS Graduate Seminar)
Summer 2016
Teaching Assistant Operating Systems (UdS Graduate Core Course)
Summer 2013