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Raluca Ada Popa

Associate Professor of Computer Science, UC Berkeley · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

academicscientistfounderexecutive@ralucaadapopa ↗people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~raluca ↗Wikipedia ↗

Raluca Ada Popa is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and Gemini Security Lead at Google DeepMind. She pioneered practical systems for computing over encrypted data and co-founded cybersecurity startups PreVeil and Opaque Systems.

17statements → 15claims → 13claims resolved → 69%fully supported → 4/5average certainty → 1.47/5average debate potential → 1said about them ↓

9 supported 4 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 1 not checkable as stated how the 15 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 14 assertions · 1 opinion · 1 insight · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 15 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 13 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Raluca argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Popa: BlindBox inspects encrypted traffic while maintaining user privacy
“So I'm going to tell you about some very recent work on Blindbox, which enables us to inspect traffic that remains encrypted and protect the privacy of the users.”
Raluca Ada Popa Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 0:14 Raluca Ada Popa

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
83% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

241 words/min while actually speaking · 31.3 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Raluca Ada Popa: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 2,618 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Raluca Ada Popa said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Current HTTPS middlebox workarounds rely on man-in-the-middle attacks
“And actually, the solution is very embarrassing and insecure solution. People basically mount a man in the middle attack on SSL.”
Raluca Ada Popa Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 3:04 Raluca Ada Popa
Assertion Supported
Popa: BlindBox inspects encrypted traffic while maintaining user privacy
“So I'm going to tell you about some very recent work on Blindbox, which enables us to inspect traffic that remains encrypted and protect the privacy of the users.”
Raluca Ada Popa Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 0:14 Raluca Ada Popa
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Popa: Computing on encrypted data will significantly impact industry
“And then I'm going to scope out from this and tell you about a bigger vision that Blindbox is part of, namely Computing on encrypted data, which I think can have a lot of impact to industry and to what people use today.”
Raluca Ada Popa Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 0:25 Raluca Ada Popa
Assertion Supported
Popa: BlindBox is first system enabling DPI on encrypted traffic
“Our system blind box is the first to show that this could be possible, and is the first system that enables DPI middle boxes to inspect traffic without seeing the traffic.”
Raluca Ada Popa Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 4:22 Raluca Ada Popa
Assertion Supported
Popa: BlindBox encryption matches security of randomized and speed of deterministic schemes
“So as part of Blindbox, our first contribution was to construct such a scheme. A scheme that is as secure as randomized schemes, and as fast as deterministic schemes.”
Raluca Ada Popa Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 8:34 Raluca Ada Popa
Assertion Supported
Popa: BlindBox detection speed is competitive with Snort
“So the detection of the middle box is competitive to Snort.”
Raluca Ada Popa Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 11:48 Raluca Ada Popa
Assertion Not yet assessed · timeframe Jul 2020
Popa: Google Encrypted Query is based on CryptDB
“Google's encrypted query is based on CryptDB.”
Raluca Ada Popa Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 13:20 Raluca Ada Popa
Insight
Popa: Computing on encrypted data eliminates the confidentiality-functionality trade-off
“But the bottom line that I want to mention is that computing on encrypted data can be practical for a set of systems that we use today. And it really gives you, at the same time, confidentiality and functionality. So you don't have to choose only one anymore.”
Raluca Ada Popa Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 14:59 Raluca Ada Popa
Assertion Supported
Popa: Microsecond Network Speeds Severely Limit Usable Cryptography
“Network rates are on the order of microseconds, so not a lot of cryptography remains that could be used in this setting.”
Raluca Ada Popa Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 6:04 Raluca Ada Popa
Assertion Partly supported
Popa: BlindBox encryption operates at network rates using hardware AES
“And third is that actually it's fast. It can run at network rates, because it only uses AES, and we have AES instructions in hardware.”
Raluca Ada Popa Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 9:39 Raluca Ada Popa
Assertion Supported
BlindBox uses secure two-party computation during SSL handshake for encrypted rule generation
“So for this, we use really cool primitive from the crypto community, namely secure two-party computation, which enables the middle box and the user during the SSL handshake to produce this encryption scheme to get this encryption encrypted value together witho…”
Raluca Ada Popa Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 10:18 Raluca Ada Popa
Assertion Partly supported
Popa: BlindBox middleboxes learn only matching malicious string locations
“The middle box learns only if a malicious string matches at some location, but it doesn't learn anything else about the other locations.”
Raluca Ada Popa Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 10:47 Raluca Ada Popa
Assertion Partly supported
Popa: BlindBox equality matching supports watermarks, filtering, and IDS rules
“Only the equality part that I told you about can support already watermarks, checking if exfiltrated documents contain watermarks, and parental filtering, and a bunch of the IDS rules.”
Raluca Ada Popa Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 11:14 Raluca Ada Popa
Assertion Supported
Popa: BlindBox increases page load time by 15% to 100%
“In terms of the transmission time, we increase it so page load time would become 15% to a hundred percent slower.”
Raluca Ada Popa Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 11:51 Raluca Ada Popa
Assertion Partly supported
CryptDB achieved 27% overhead compared to MySQL on TPCC benchmark
“So for industry standard benchmarks such as TPCC, CryptDB had an overhead of 27% compared to MySQL.”
Raluca Ada Popa Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 13:02 Raluca Ada Popa
Assertion Supported
Popa: A Boston hospital uses Myler for medical applications
“And actually a hospital in Boston is currently using Myler in one of their medical applications.”
Raluca Ada Popa Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 14:18 Raluca Ada Popa
Assertion Supported
Raluca Ada Popa: BlindBox HTTPS operates without altering core SSL primitives
“What we build in Blindbox is an enhanced version of HTTPS called Blindbox HTTPS. And with Blindbox HTTPS when a user sends a message the user gets the message gets encrypted through SSL as before, so we don't change SSL.”
Raluca Ada Popa Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 6:38 Raluca Ada Popa

The other half of the tape: Raluca Ada Popa's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode on the a16z Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Dan Boneh 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0011112017episodesmentions
0112017episodes it came up in
000.50.5112017episodesmentions per episode
2017 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Raluca Ada Popa Jul 28, 2017 13m
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