Her research interests are in cryptography and security, focusing on exploring and expanding the foundations of cryptography and designing practical cryptographic protocols with provable security guarantees. Specific areas she works on include complexity of cryptographic primitives, foundations of security against physical (tampering, leakage, exposure) attacks, theory and practice of secure computation, and private search over encrypted data. Malkin received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000, and joined Columbia after three years as a research scientist in the Secure Systems Research Department at AT&T Labs - Research.