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Speaker: Vinod Vaikuntanathan
IBM T.J. Watson
Title: Side Channels and Clouds: New Challenges in Cryptography
Abstract: Emerging trends in computation such as cloud computing,
virtualization, and
trusted computing require that computation be carried out in
remote and
hostile environments, where attackers have unprecedented
access to the
devices, the data and the programs. This poses new problems
and challenges
for cryptography. In this talk, I will present two such
challenges, and my
recent work towards solving them.
1. Protecting against Side-channel Attacks: Computing
devices leak
information to the outside world not just through
input-output interaction,
but through physical characteristics of computation such as
power
consumption, timing, and electro-magnetic radiation. Such
leakage betrays
information about the secrets stored within the devices, and
has been
successfully utilized to break many cryptographic algorithms
in common use.
These attacks, commonly called side-channel attacks, are
particularly easy
to carry out when the device is in the physical proximity of
the attacker,
as is often the case for modern devices such as smart-cards,
TPM chips,
mobile phones and laptops.
In the first part of the talk, I will describe my recent
work that lays the
foundation of *leakage-resilient cryptography* – the design
of cryptographic
schemes that protect against large classes of side-channel
attacks.
2. Computing on Encrypted Data: Security in the setting of
cloud computing
involves a delicate balance of privacy and functionality:
while the client
must encrypt its data to keep it private from the server, it
should also
allow for the server to *compute on the encrypted data*. Can we
simultaneously achieve these opposing goals?
In the second part of the talk, I will describe an
elementary construction
of a cryptographic mechanism (called a “fully homomorphic
encryption
scheme”) that allows arbitrary computation to be performed
on encrypted
data.
Both these works leverage new mathematical techniques based
on geometric
objects called *lattices.*
Bio:
Vinod Vaikuntanathan is a postdoctoral fellow in the
cryptography group at
IBM T.J. Watson. He received a Ph.D. from MIT in 2009 under
the guidance of
Shafi Goldwasser. He is a recipient of the MIT Akamai
Graduate Fellowship,
the IBM Josef Raviv Postdoctoral Fellowship, and more
recently, the MIT
George M. Sprowls award for the best Ph.D. thesis in
Computer Science. The
focus of his research involves the dual goals of devising
new mathematical
tools for cryptography, as well as applying theoretical
cryptography to
counter practical attacks.
For Additional Information, contact:
Charles Rackoff
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