Ashwin Karthikeyan

I am a first-year Ph.D. student at the Privacy Preserving Systems Lab under the supervision of Prof. Anwar Hithnawi. My research centers on succint and privacy-preserving automated reasoning, with the goal of making formal verification scalable, reusable, and secure. Prior to enrolling in the Ph.D. program, I was a research-intern at MeelGroup where I developed practical zero-knowledge proofs to verify Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBFs). In the summer of 2025, I was a visiting scholar at Microsoft Research where I worked with Dr. Neeraj Kayal and Dr. Ramarathnam Venkatesan on robust optimization of smooth loss functions. Before this, I completed my undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Toronto.

Talks

Towards Practical Zero-Knowledge Proof for PSPACE

• International Workshop on Highlights in Organizing and Optimizing Proof-logging Systems (WHOOPS '26) at the Federated Logic Conference (FLoC 2026), Lisbon, July 2026
• IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P '2026), San Francisco, May 2026
• Ontario Cryptography Day, Toronto, November 2025

Scaling Zero Knowledge UNSAT Verification via Normalized Chaining

• Pragmatics of SAT International Workshop (PoS '26) at the Federated Logic Conference (FLoC 2026), Lisbon, July 2026

Publications

Scaling Zero Knowledge UNSAT Verification via Normalized Chaining Paper Github

Ashwin Karthikeyan*, Ethan Kharitonov*, Kuldeep S. Meel, Anwar Hithnawi

Conference on Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Reasoning (LPAR 2026)

Towards Practical Zero-Knowledge Proof for PSPACE Paper Github

Ashwin Karthikeyan, Hengyu Liu, Kuldeep S. Meel, Ning Luo

IEEE Security and Privacy (Oakland) 2026.