Computer Science Colloquia
Friday, March 22, 2013
Huijia (Rachel) Lin, MIT and Boston University
Host: abhi shelat
3:30 PM, Rice Hall, Room 130 (auditorium), followed by a reception in Rice Hall Fourth Floor Atrium (west end)
Theoretical Foundations for Applied Cryptography
ABSTRACT
Cryptographic protocols have been developed for a variety of
tasks, including electronic auctions, electronic voting systems, privacy
preserving data mining and more. Traditionally, these cryptographic
protocols were analyzed in a simple "stand-alone" model which considers
a single execution of the protocols taking place in isolation. Yet, in
open networks, such as the Internet, executions of cryptographic
protocols may occur concurrently. This concurrency undermines the
security of protocols designed for the simple "stand-alone" model. As a
consequence, in the past two decades, the study of concurrent security
has been a main effort in Cryptography.
In this talk, I will present the first concurrently-secure protocols
that enable securely performing general tasks (including all the
above-mentioned ones), without relying on any trusted infrastructures or
strong hardness assumptions. In particular, I introduce a novel
technique that transforms any cryptographic protocol designed for the
simple "stand-alone" setting, into one that is secure under concurrent
executions. On the way, I solve a two-decade-old open problem,
originating in the seminal paper introducing concurrent security.
Bio: Huijia Lin is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the MIT
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the
Department of Computer Science at Boston University. Earlier, she
obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University. Her
research interests are in the field of cryptography.