Christina Garman co-authored research that helped make private digital money real, and has spent the years since finding the flaws in systems that are supposed to be secure. She now serves on Sovright's board, carrying that founding science into a mission that began with Zcash and reaches well beyond it.
She is an associate professor of computer science at Purdue, where her research develops and deploys privacy-enhancing technologies and probes the security of the hardware and systems they run on. As a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins she was part of the team that wrote Zerocash, the 2014 paper that applied zero-knowledge proofs to payments and made it possible to send money while hiding its origin, destination, and amount. That paper became the basis of Zcash and won the Test-of-Time Award at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
Her more recent work scrutinizes the systems the industry treats as secure. She has repeatedly demonstrated attacks on trusted execution environments, the hardware enclaves that many privacy and confidential-computing products depend on. These efforts earned her a Distinguished Paper Award at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in 2025. She also holds an NSF CAREER Award and two best-paper awards for that body of work.
At Sovright, Christina helps guide an organization built to keep privacy infrastructure trustworthy, so that individuals stay in control of their money and their data. That is the standard she has held throughout her research, where private systems only count if they hold up in practice.
Areas of expertise
Applied cryptography, privacy-enhancing technologies, systems and hardware security, and zero-knowledge proofs.
Track record
- Sovright: Member of the Board of Directors (2026–present)
- Purdue University: Associate Professor of Computer Science
- Zcash: Co-founder and founding scientist (Zerocash, 2014)
- Honors: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Test-of-Time Award (2024), NSF CAREER Award (2021)
- Education: PhD and MS Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University (2017, 2013); BS Computer Science and Engineering and BA Mathematics, Bucknell University (2011)
Featured appearances and writing
- Garman wins Test-of-Time Award at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy,
- zk-creds: Flexible Anonymous Credentials,
- Dancing on the Lip of the Volcano: Chosen Ciphertext Attacks on Apple iMessage,
- Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin
- Zerocoin: Anonymous Distributed E-Cash from Bitcoin