Cryptography, applied

To lower costs and improve outcomes in current medical practice we need integrated interoperable medical systems to provide machine-assisted care, interaction detection, and improved alarm accuracy, to name just a few uses. This project is developing both the theory and practice to ensure the safety of next-generation medical devices by allowing secure coordination and composition, in facilities as small as a local doctor's office or as large as a multi-campus hospital.

This project addresses how semiconductor designers can verify the correctness of ICs that they source from possibly untrusted fabricators. Existing solutions to this problem are either based on legal and contractual obligations, or use post-fabrication IC testing, both of which are unsatisfactory or unsound. As a sound alternative, this project designs and fabricates verifiable hardware: ICs that provide proofs of their correctness for every input-output computation they perform in the field.

This project aims to obtain provably optimal cryptographic constructions, using objectively practical techniques, for a wide range of tasks. To achieve this goal, the project makes progress on three technical fronts. First, a general-purpose framework is developed that encompasses and systematizes known practical cryptographic techniques from many domains. Second, the project develops techniques for proving concrete, fine-grained lower bounds about constructions within this framework. Finally, techniques from program synthesis will be applied to the new framework.

A wide range of cloud services and applications operate on sensitive data such as business, personal, and governmental information. This renders security and privacy as the most critical concerns in the cloud era. The objective of this project is to question the separation approach in the design of security and reliability features of storage systems, and to investigate new, coding-based security mechanisms based on a joint-design principle. The proposed program will result in a myriad of outcomes.

The rapid advancement of techniques for secure computation on protected data offers a major incentive for development of tools for general-purpose secure computation that protects data privacy, as opposed to computation of specialized tasks. The recent emergence of cloud computing and the need to protect privacy of sensitive data used in outsourced computation serves as another major motivation for this work. With this in mind, this project targets at developing a compiler suitable for privacy-preserving execution of any functionality specified by a user program.