Scientific Foundations

Cyber security is considered one of the most important aspects of our information technology based society. Key Exchange(KE) is a fundamental cryptographic primitive, and authenticated KE (AKE) is one of the most used cryptographic tools in secure communication protocols (e.g. SSL/TLS, IPSec, SSH) over the Internet. In light of the threat that quantum computers pose to cryptosystems such as RSA and ECC, this project is devoted to the development of secure and efficient AKE alternatives for the post-quantum computer world, which is now considered of a high priority by the US government.

The trend of outsourcing semiconductor manufacturing to oversea foundries has introduced several security vulnerabilities -- reverse engineering, malicious circuit insertion, counterfeiting, and intellectual property piracy -- making the semiconductor industry lose billions of dollars. Split manufacturing of integrated circuits reduces vulnerabilities introduced by an untrusted foundry by manufacturing only some of the layers at an untrusted high-end foundry and the remaining layers at a trusted low-end foundry.

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is a promising new technology that enables an untrusted party to efficiently compute directly on ciphertexts. For instance, with FHE a cloud server without access to the user's encrypted content can still provide text search services. An efficient FHE scheme would significantly improve the security of sensitive user data stored and processed on cloud servers. Significant progress has been made in bringing FHE proposals closer to practice.

The modern web experience is dynamic, providing users with a highly responsive interface through which to interact with the world. Today's mechanisms allow servers---even those which are controlled by an attacker---to download arbitrary programs into a user's browser. It is extraordinarily difficult to secure the web browser (and its user) against attack in this scenario. While tools and techniques are useful to analyze and restrict downloaded code, they are by their very nature incomplete. As a result, the security of web services relies on a series of ad hoc, service-provided techniques.

Social networks provide many benefits, but also give rise to serious concerns regarding privacy. Indeed, since privacy protections are not intrinsically incorporated into the underlying technological framework, user data is still accessible to the social network and is open to misuse. While there have been efforts to incorporate privacy into social networks, existing solutions are not sufficiently lightweight, transparent, and functional, and therefore have achieved only limited adoption.