Medium

When a program accesses data stored in memory, disk, or on a remote server, its access patterns can leak information about the secret inputs and data. There has been decades of work that investigated how to make a program "oblivious", such that its access patterns leak nothing about the secret inputs or data. Past techniques, however, incur a considerable performance overhead. This project conceives and investigates new, relaxed notions of access pattern privacy, and discovers new algorithms that achieve such notions of privacy with little to no overhead.

Quantum computers are believed to have a potential to perform specialized calculations beyond the reach of any supercomputer in existence today, threatening today's major public-key cryptography standards. Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) is devoted to the design and analysis of cryptographic algorithms that are resistant against any known attacks using quantum computers, but by themselves can be implemented using classical computing platforms, based on current semiconductor technologies.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to revolutionize the world in fields ranging from technology to medicine, physics and the social sciences. Yet as AI is deployed in these domains, recent work has shown that systems may be vulnerable to different types of attacks that cause them to misbehave; for instance, attacks that cause an AI system to recognize a stop sign as a speed-limit sign.

The discipline of cryptography provides the basic digital tools used across the globe to ensure data privacy and authenticity. With the broad deployment of these tools--often invisibly embedded in commercial software or hardware--an unconventional but devastating type of cyberattacks have emerged. These attacks involve deploying a cleverly subverted version of a cryptographic tool that appears to function normally, but in fact deliberately reduces security in a covert way that is known only to the subverting party.

The discipline of cryptography provides the basic digital tools used across the globe to ensure data privacy and authenticity. With the broad deployment of these tools--often invisibly embedded in commercial software or hardware--an unconventional but devastating type of cyberattacks have emerged. These attacks involve deploying a cleverly subverted version of a cryptographic tool that appears to function normally, but in fact deliberately reduces security in a covert way that is known only to the subverting party.