CAREER

One of the oldest and most challenging problems in cyber security is to enable secure information sharing (SIS) (i.e., maintaining some control over information even after it has been shared.) For example, a product manufacturer may need to share customer account information with a company that ships the products and bills the customers. The manufacturer cannot allow its partner to then misuse those customer records by direct marketing or selling customer records. This project focuses on the policy challenge of specifying, analyzing and enforcing SIS policies.

Content distribution is an important application domain for cryptographic techniques. Existing security solutions for multi recipient communication, like broadcast encryption, focus mostly on the concerns of the content originator. This project tackles the problem from a broader perspective that includes the privacy concerns of the recipients, and develops cryptographic models and protocols for content distribution that provide guarantees beyond the mere secrecy of the data. The outcomes of this research will enable solutions that address the privacy issues associated with cloud storage.

Applications that run on billions of mobile devices backed by enormous datacenters hold the promise of personal, always-on healthcare; of intelligent vehicles and homes; and thus of a healthier, more efficient society. It is imperative to make such applications secure by protecting their integrity and keeping their data confidential. However, malicious programs (``malware'') today can subvert the best software-level defenses by impersonating benign processes on mobile devices or by attacking victim processes through the hardware on shared datacenter servers.

Our society is becoming increasingly reliant on powerful and interconnected computing devices that store much of our personal information. These devices present an ever-growing tension between the desire for our personal information to be private, and the desire to put our personal information to good use for our own convenience. In cryptography, problems that involve requirements of useful computation and privacy are understood through the lens of secure multi-party computation (SMPC).

Cryptography is essential to ensure confidentiality and integrity of information. Due to their practicality, symmetric algorithms where the same secret key is used by the sender and the recipient underlie most practical deployments of cryptographic techniques. However, also as a result of this, symmetric cryptography suffers from an inherent tension between real world efficiency demands and provable security guarantees. This project investigates new technical advances aimed at narrowing the gap between provable security and the practical demands of symmetric cryptography.