PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Prateek Mittal

Prateek Mittal is a Princeton professor of electrical and computer engineering whose work links internet security, privacy-preserving systems and machine learning. After studying computer science and engineering at IIT Guwahati, he pursued graduate work in Illinois, completed postdoctoral work at Berkeley, and joined Princeton’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2013. His research helped secure internet certificate issuance, and his ICLR 2025 paper on language-model safety alignment won an Outstanding Paper Award. He won the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 2024 and became an IEEE Fellow in 2026.

Works
263
Citations
17,106
h-index
48
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2006

    From IIT Guwahati to Illinois

    He grows up in New Delhi and studies computer science and engineering at IIT Guwahati. In 2006, he begins graduate work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

  2. 2013

    Joining the Princeton faculty

    After postdoctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley, he joins Princeton’s faculty in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2013.

  3. 2018–2020

    BGP attacks on certificates

    In 2018, he coauthors “Bamboozling Certificate Authorities with BGP,” which analyzes how BGP route hijacks can enable bogus certificates and proposes defenses that check domains from multiple network vantage points. Princeton and Let’s Encrypt implement a countermeasure in 2020.

  4. July 2022–June 2023

    Leading Princeton’s CITP

    He serves as interim director of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy from July 2022 through June 2023.

  5. 2024

    An ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award

    He wins the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 2024. In 2024, Let’s Encrypt plans to work with his research group on secure data for added remote validation perspectives and ACME Renewal Information.

  6. 2025

    Safety alignment beyond first tokens

    At ICLR 2025, he coauthors a study of shallow safety alignment, which wins an Outstanding Paper Award. The paper links jailbreak vulnerabilities to alignment that changes a model’s output distribution mainly over its first few tokens, and proposes a regularized objective that makes safety more persistent against fine-tuning attacks.

  7. 2026

    An IEEE Fellowship

    In 2026, he becomes an IEEE Fellow for contributions to privacy-preserving and secure systems that create societal impact.

  8. As of October 2026

    Professor at Princeton

    As of October 2026, he is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton. His research focuses on secure and privacy-preserving communication systems, privacy-enhancing technologies and internet/network security.

Career

  1. Since 2013Princeton UniversityProfessor, Interim Director
  2. 2023–2026Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology
  3. 2011–2013University of California, Berkeley

Education

  1. From 2006University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  2. Indian Institute of Technology GuwahatiComputer science and engineering

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning2020 · Foundations and Trends® in Machine Learning · 7,642 citationsWith Daniel Ramage, Dawn Song, Farinaz Koushanfar, Mehryar Mohri, Qiang Yang and Ramesh Raskar
  2. Analyzing Federated Learning through an Adversarial Lens2018 · 695 citations
  3. SybilInfer: Detecting Sybil Nodes using Social Networks2009 · 411 citations
  4. RobustBench: a standardized adversarial robustness benchmark2020 · 284 citationsWith Matthias Hein
  5. Falcon: Honest-Majority Maliciously Secure Framework for Private Deep Learning2021 · 248 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 21 October 2026.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Prateek Mittal. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. 84% of people shaping AI with recorded undergraduate and doctoral schools changed institutions for their doctorateIncludes Princeton University. 84% of people shaping AI with recorded undergraduate and doctoral schools changed institutions for their doctorate. Across 2,116 people with both an undergraduate degree and a doctorate recorded, we trace which undergraduate schools feed which doctoral programs, how often students stay at the same school, and how paths differ by birth-country region.
  3. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Princeton University. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  4. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Princeton University. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Prateek Mittal yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. CITP interim director has built a record of research with societal impact engineering.princeton.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Bamboozling Certificate Authorities with BGP usenix.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Internet security upgrade borne out of collaboration between Princeton and Let’s Encrypt engineering.princeton.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Tech expert Arvind Narayanan takes helm at joint technology-policy center engineering.princeton.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. Let’s Encrypt Continues Partnership with Princeton to Bolster Internet Security letsencrypt.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. Jamieson, Mittal named IEEE Fellows engineering.princeton.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. SAFETY ALIGNMENT SHOULD BE MADE MORE THAN JUST A FEW TOKENS DEEP collaborate.princeton.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  8. Announcing the Outstanding Paper Awards at ICLR 2025 blog.iclr.cc. Checked 20 October 2026.
  9. Prateek Mittal - Princeton Engineering engineering.princeton.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.