2020
Prof. Kenny Paterson gives a keynote talk at external pageCANS 2020 - 19th International Conference on Cryptology and Network Security, 14 - 16 December 2020.
30 January 2020, 12:00-13:30, ZISC CNB F 100.9
Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, EPFL. Private Information Retrieval with Sublinear Online Time.
We present the first protocols for private information retrieval that allow fast (sublinear-time) database lookups without increasing the server-side storage requirements. To achieve these efficiency goals, our protocols work in an offline/online model. In an offline phase, which takes place before the client has decided which database bit it wants to read, the client fetches a short string from the servers. In a subsequent online phase, the client can privately retrieve its desired bit of the database by making a second query to the servers. By pushing the bulk of the server-side computation into the offline phase (which is independent of the client's query), our protocols allow the online phase to complete very quickly - in time sublinear in the size of the database. Finally, we prove that our protocols are optimal in terms of the trade-off they achieve between communication and running time.
This talk will be based on joint work with Dmitry Kogan (Stanford).
Short Bio: Henry Corrigan-Gibbs is a postdoc in Bryan Ford's Decentralized and Distributed Systems Lab at EPFL and earlier was a PhD student with Dan Boneh at Stanford. His research interests are in computer security, applied cryptography, and online privacy. Henry and his collaborators have received the Best Young Researcher Paper Award at TCC 2019 and Eurocrypt 2018, the 2016 Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies, and the 2015 IEEE Security and Privacy Distinguished Paper Award. Henry will become an assistant professor at MIT CSAIL in Fall 2020.
Members
Semira Einsele joins the Applied Cryptography Group as a scientific assistant for three months starting 1 November 2020. She is interested in the number-theoretic and algebraic aspects of cryptography. Semira has already done her Master thesis in our group and is now continuing her work on average-case error bounds for probabilistic primality tests.
Dr. Patrick Towa joins the Applied Cryptography Group on 1 November 2020 as a postdoctoral researcher. He did his PhD in the Security and Privacy Group of IBM Research – Zurich, where he worked on developing privacy-preserving cryptographic protocols for practical applications. He was also an external PhD student in the CASCADE group of ENS and PSL Research University under the supervision of Damien Vergnaud. He is interested in privacy-friendly cryptosystems, zero-knowledge proofs, randomness and various mathematical problems that arise in cryptograpy.
Dr. Sikhar Patranabis is leaving our group on 31 October 2020 to pursue a career as a staff research scientist at Visa Research in California, USA. We will miss having Sikhar around both as a professional colleague and as a friend. We thank Sikhar very much for helping the group get off to a strong start, and wish him all the very best for his future endeavours.
Dr. Anu Unnikrishnan joins the Applied Cryptography Group on 1 October 2020 as a postdoctoral researcher. She did her PhD in quantum cryptography at the University of Oxford in collaboration with Sorbonne Université, where she worked on developing and analysing the security of protocols for quantum networks. She is interested in all aspects of real-world cryptographic systems and post-quantum cryptography.
Jan Gilcher joins the Applied Cryptography Group on 1 September 2020 as a doctoral student. He is interested in the challenges that arise when cryptography meets real world systems and hardware. This is complemented by an interest in formal methods, both applied in this area and in general.
Lukas Burkhalter joins the Applied Cryptography Group on 1 August 2020 as a third-year doctoral student. He is interested in data privacy and data security. In his research, he focuses on designing and developing a new class of encrypted data processing systems tailored to meet the performance and functionality requirements of complex applications. His work tries to facilitate the broader adoption of end-to-end encrypted applications.
Alexander Viand joins the Applied Cryptography Group on 1 August 2020 as a third-year doctoral student. He is interested in useable security and privacy, privacy enhancing technologies, and the interactions between these technologies and society. In his research, he works with secure computation technologies including Fully Homomorphic Encryption, Secure Multi-Party Computation and Zero-Knowledge Proofs, trying to make these techniques more accessible to non-experts by developing new systems, tools and abstractions.
Zichen Gui is visiting the Applied Cryptography Group from 18 November 2019 to 17 July 2020. He is a doctoral student at the University of Bristol. He is interested in searchable encryption, with a focus on finding a better definition of security, and propose and implement schemes that are secure and efficient.
Dr. Igors Stepanovs joins the Applied Cryptography Group on 1 February 2020 as a postdoctoral researcher. He received his PhD advised by Mihir Bellare at UC San Diego. He is broadly interested in practice-oriented cryptography. His recent work is on formalising the security requirements of real-world applications, analysing the existing solutions and proposing new ones.