Dakshita Khurana is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She enjoys working in cryptography and the foundations of security, and broadly in theoretical computer science. Her work develops new tools and techniques to enable security in a variety of new settings, and without the need for any central trust or setup assumptions.

She obtained her PhD from UCLA in 2018, where she was a recipient of the computer science department's Outstanding Graduating Student Award, and the Dissertation Year Fellowship. She is interested in all aspects of cryptography, with a special emphasis on the foundations of cryptographic protocol design.