Cryptography, theory

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Visible to the public TWC: Frontier: Collaborative: CORE: Center for Encrypted Functionalities

The Center for Encrypted Functionalities (CORE) tackles the deep and far-reaching problem of general-purpose "program obfuscation," which aims to enhance cybersecurity by making an arbitrary computer program unintelligible while preserving its functionality.

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Visible to the public STARSS: TTP Option: Small: A Quantum Approach to Hardware Security: from Theory to Optical Implementation

The problem of ensuring that computer hardware is not surreptitiously malicious is a growing concern. The case of random number generators (RNGs) is particularly important because random numbers are foundational to information security. All current solutions in practice require trusting the hardware, and are therefore vulnerable to hardware attacks. This project explores a quantum-based solution to hardware security by designing and implementing a new class of RNGs that can prove their own integrity to the user.

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Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Collaborative: New Protocols and Systems for RAM-Based Secure Computation

Secure computation allows users to collaboratively compute any program on their private data, while ensuring that they learn nothing beyond the output of the computation. Existing protocols for secure computation primarily rely on a boolean-circuit representation for the program being evaluated, which can be highly inefficient. This project focuses on developing secure-computation protocols in the RAM model of computation. Particularly challenging here is the need to ensure that memory accesses are oblivious, and do not leak information about private data.

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Visible to the public NSFSaTC-BSF: TWC: Small: Horizons of Symmetric-Key Cryptography

Symmetric-key primitives are the lifeblood of practical cryptography, and are critical components of nearly any computer security system. The cryptographic community has developed a rich body of work on theoretically sound symmetric objects, but they are many orders of magnitude too slow for realistic usage. Thus, practitioners use fast primitives that have been designed to withstand known attacks, but which lack rigorous security guarantees based on natural mathematical problems.

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Visible to the public SaTC-EDU: EAGER Enhancing Cybersecurity Education Through a Representational Fluency Model

Cybersecurity experts must possess several abilities: deep technical skills, the capability to recognize and respond to complex and emergent behavior, mastery of using abstractions and principles, the ability to assess risk and handle uncertainty, problem-solving and reasoning skills, and facility in adversarial thinking. Based on cognitive theory, this project will investigate the efficacy of model eliciting activities for developing students' ability to recognize and respond to complex and emergent behavior, and how to handle uncertainty and ambiguity.

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Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Collaborative: Distribution-Sensitive Cryptography

Contemporary encryption schemes are almost exclusively distribution-agnostic. Their security properties are independent of the statistical characteristics of plaintexts, and the output of these schemes are ciphertexts that are uniformly distributed bit strings, irrespective of use case. While conceptually simple, such encryption schemes fail to meet basic, real-world requirements and have left longstanding functional gaps in key security applications.

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Design and Analysis of Symmetric Key Ciphers

Pseudorandom sequences (PRS) exhibit a statistical randomness and are widely used in applications where randomness is needed and PRS generation can be effectively done. Many everyday applications in digital computing and communication require randomness to operate correctly. For example, these include secure network communications, global positioning systems, and even weather prediction simulations. Yet, few general generators of high quality pseudorandom sequences are known.

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Visible to the public EAGER: Guaranteed-Secure and Searchable Genomic Data Repositories

Publicly available and searchable genomic data banks could revolutionize clinical and research settings, but privacy concerns about releasing such information are currently preventing its usage. This project aims to address these concerns by providing new mechanisms by which individuals can donate their genomic information to a data bank in such a way that third parties, such as doctors or researchers, querying the data bank are guaranteed to learn only aggregate functions of the population's data that the individuals authorize.

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Visible to the public TWC: TTP Option: Frontier: Collaborative: MACS: A Modular Approach to Cloud Security

The goal of the Modular Approach to Cloud Security (MACS) project is to develop methods for building information systems with meaningful multi-layered security guarantees. The modular approach of MACS focuses on systems that are built from smaller and separable functional components, where the security of each component is asserted individually, and where the security of the system as a whole can be derived from the security of its components. The project concentrates on building outsourced, cloud-based information services with client-centric security guarantees.

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Visible to the public NSFSaTC-BSF: TWC: Small: Cryptography and Communication Complexity

Current cloud based systems enable distributed access to both information and computational resources. In this setting, it is imperative to have secure communication, and powerful and expensive cryptographic techniques have been proposed to address this issue. A severely limiting factor, however, is that these methods for securely accessing or processing data between participating parties can result in communication overheads when processing large amounts of data.