CRII

Individuals generate enormous amounts of personal data that are subsequently collected and stored by organizations and governments. The data powers many innovative applications in areas such as web services, health care, and transportation, but they also increase privacy risks. Differential privacy, a framework to rigorously reason about privacy properties of algorithms, holds tremendous promise for enabling privacy-preserving yet useful data analyses. However, its adoption has been limited to entities with massive user bases.

The Internet's size and complexity make it difficult to understand what happens to network packets as they travel from source to destination. Internet service providers and governments sometimes interfere with users' online activities, further complicating this task. This project advances the scientific understanding of network interference detection by developing new methods to remotely measure the manipulation of Internet traffic, such as attempts to censor, tamper with, and monitor users' online activities.

Due to the prohibitive costs of semiconductor manufacturing, most computer chip design companies outsource their production to offshore foundries. As many of these chips may be manufactured in environments of limited trust, problems of the piracy of intellectual property (IP) and the overproduction of integrated circuits (ICs) have emerged in recent years. This project focuses on designing a secure logic locking technique to enable protection against untrusted IC manufacturing. The developed solution is resistant to all known attacks.

Recent data breaches have exposed billions of user passwords to the dangerous threat of an offline password attacker who attempts to guess each user's password by brute force. Because an offline attacker can validate each password guess by itself using stolen password hashes from a data breach it is not possible to "lock out" an offline attacker after several incorrect guesses. The attacker is limited only by the computational resources necessary to mount a brute-force attack.

Many real-world cryptographic schemes are based on the provable-security paradigm, certifying their security via some proof. However, in several important settings, existing proofs for the in-use constructions give weak security bounds, even to the extent that these results are not meaningful. Moreover, many proofs in the literature are buggy, giving false confidence on the security of constructions which are in fact vulnerable.