Scaling Secure Computation

David Evans
Distinguished Speaker
Oregon Computer Security Day
Eugene, Oregon
5 April 2013

Two-party secure computation offers the potential for two participants to securely compute a function that depends on both of their inputs, without revealing those inputs to the other party or needing to trust any third party. For example, it could enable two people who meet at a conference to learn what contacts they have in common without revealing any of their other contacts or allow a pharmaceutical company to determine if a patient's genome shares common markers with successful participants in a study group, without revealing the genomes of the patient or study members. A general solution to this problem have been known since Andrew Yao's pioneering work on garbled circuits in the 1980s, but only recently has it become conceivable to use this approach in real systems. Our group has developed a framework for building efficient and scalable secure computations that achieves orders of magnitude performance improvements over the best previous systems. In this talk, I'll describe the techniques we use to design scalable and efficient secure computation protocols and share some recent results on improving the security and performance of secure computing applications.

Slides: [PDF] [PPSX]