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Global excellence and local relevance in research, teaching, and technology development is the vision of the Department. The Department was started as the Computer Centre in 1973 with the acquisition of an IBM 370, perhaps the most powerful computer in India at that time. It offered M.Tech, M.S and PhD degree programmes. In 1983, the B.Tech degree programme was started.

Today the Department has a vibrant student body numbering about 400. Over 60% are postgraduate, mostly supported by scholarships. The Department also offers several attractive industry-sponsored Fellowships for outstanding PhD scholars and liberally supports participation in top-ranking international conferences.

The department has been funded by FIST program from DST, Govt. of India in 2002 and 2017. The Secure Systems Laboratory is funded by FIST program 2017.



Message from the Head of the Department

Welcome to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Madras. IIT Madras was ranked first amongst several other similar Research and Teaching institutions in Engineering, for the continuous seventh time in the 2022 edition of National Institute Ranking Framework established by the Ministry for Human Resources Development (MHRD), the Government of India. IIT Madras was ranked amongst the top 50 Asian Universities in the QS rankings 2018.

The Department started as the Computer Centre in 1973 with the acquisition of an IBM 370 Computer. It presently offers B. Tech., dual-degree B.Tech./ M.Tech., M.Tech., M.S., Ph.D. degree programmes. A dual-degree B.Tech/M.Tech. program in data science, open to all B.Tech. students of IIT Madras, has been started from Jan. 2018.

The department has a vibrant student body numbering around 700 and faculty numbering nearly 35. About 60% of students are postgraduates, mostly supported by government of India scholarships and research projects. The Departments also offers several attractive industry-sponsored fellowships for outstanding Ph.D. scholars.

The vision of the CSE Department is Global Excellence and Local Relevance in Research, teaching, and technology development in Computer Science and Engineering. In pursuit of this vision, the Department is actively engaged in research activities in various research areas.

The Department’s research activities have been funded by several Government organizations such as Department of Science & Technology (DST), Ministry Of Electronics & Information Technology (MeiTY), and Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO); and by several industries including Accenture, Amazon, Ciena, Google, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Tata Power Corporation, and VMWare. Several of our alumni hold important positions in the industry and academia worldwide. Students have been recently placed, both in India and abroad, in several leading national and international companies including Adobe, Apple, Flipkart, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Intel, Juniper, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Ola, Oracle, Paypal, Qualcomm, Samsung, Uber, and Visa. Many Ph.D. graduates are serving as faculty members, both in India and abroad, in reputed educational institutions such as Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Madras, IIT Guwahati, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Jodhpur, IIT Dharwad, IIT Mandi, IIT Palakkad, IIT Tirupati, IIIT Bangalore, IIITDM Kancheepuram, NIT Calicut, NIT Trichy, Iowa State University, Queen’s University Belfast, and National University of Singapore.

Prof. V. Krishna Nandivada
Head of the Department
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Chennai - 600036


Indistinguishability Obfuscation Without Multilinear Maps: New Methods for Bootstrapping and Instantiation
(Research by: Shweta Agrawal)
International Conference on Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques (EUROCRYPT 2019)

Note : The following description is being quoted from the article Making Cryptography Less Cryptic.

Cryptography is a beautiful branch of mathematics which guarantees the art of secret keeping. In today’s world of big data, there is a serious conflict between utility and privacy. The prime example of this conflict comes from the field of medicine — the abundance of genetic data today makes it possible to imagine a future where medicines can be personalized, but developing this capability requires running algorithms on large scale genetic data which is highly sensitive, and may compromise the privacy of individuals. Another such example is the raging privacy debates pertaining to the biometric database in India (Aadhaar).

Modern cryptography has taken huge strides in expressiveness and generality, tackling paradoxical questions such as ‘if is it possible to run machine learning algorithms on encrypted data’ to ‘is it possible to prove that I know a secret without telling you what I know?’ to ‘is it possible to obfuscate computer programs so that they perform the intended functionality of the program but are guaranteed to reveal nothing about the inner workings of the program, even given its code?’

In recent work to appear at Eurocrypt 2019, Dr Shweta Agrawal provided new approaches to the problem of constructing obfuscation and gave new candidate obfuscators based on novel mathematical hardness assumptions. This advances the state of the art in constructing obfuscation, and bringing it closer to resolution.


Global excellence and local relevance in research, teaching, and technology development is the vision of the Department. The Department was started as the Computer Centre in 1973 with the acquisition of an IBM 370, perhaps the most powerful computer in India at that time. It offered M.Tech, M.S and PhD degree programmes. In 1983, the B.Tech degree programme was started.

Today the Department has a vibrant student body numbering about 700. Over 60% are postgraduate, mostly supported by scholarships. The Department also offers several attractive industry-sponsored Fellowships for outstanding PhD scholars and liberally supports participation in top-ranking international conferences.

The department has been funded by FIST program from DST, Govt. of India in 2002 and 2017. The Secure Systems Laboratory is funded by FIST program 2017.