Kinan Dak Albab

Kinan Dak Albab is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences (CDS) at Boston University. He is interested in building real systems and practical tools to improve privacy in the real-world. In his research, Kinan uses techniques from computer systems, cryptography, and programming languages.

Kinan builds systems to assist developers in ensuring that their applications comply with their desired privacy policies, including requirements mandated by privacy and data protection laws such as the GDPR and CCPA. These policies range from access control and user consent to purpose limitation, data deletion, and many others. Kinan also works on building and deploying efficient and easy-to-use systems to bring privacy enhancing technologies to practice, including secure multiparty computation (MPC) and differential privacy. Kinan is particularly interested in leveraging memory safe languages, such as Rust, to achieve high level privacy and security guarantees, as well as building systems and tools to ensure developers can use and reason about Rust effectively, e.g. in the presence of unsafe code.

Prior to joining CDS, Kinan received his PhD in Computer Science from Brown University in 2025 advised by Malte Schwarzkopf, where he won Brown’s Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching. Kinan’s software has been used in the real world to perform privacy-preserving analytics for the social good, enable health analytics over non-contact sensors, and validate the next generation of SDN network switches at Google.

Research Interests

• Privacy-conscious computer and data systems
• Privacy enhancing technologies and their applications
• Systems security and language-based security

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