Protect

While the mathematical study of cryptography has yielded a rich theory, and while the use of cryptography has become quite widespread, there is unfortunately still a significant gap between the theory and practice of cryptography. The goal of this project is to bridge this gap. The emphasis will be on the design and analysis of fundamental cryptographic primitives, such as hash functions and block ciphers, as well as other primitives derived from them, that are practical and yet theoretically sound. Indeed, hash functions and block ciphers are used in almost any cryptographic application.

In order to enable collaboration between different parties it is necessary that the partners reach an agreement on the policy rules that will govern their interaction. While state-of-the-art mechanisms will allow the parties to reconcile their polices, today's policy reconciliation protocols have two main shortcomings. First, they violate privacy since at least one of the parties is required to discloses all its information during the reconciliation process. Second, they generally lack fairness, i.e., the parties' preferences are not recognized.

Our society has become increasingly dependent on electronic information exchange between personal devices and the cloud. Unfortunately, the number of identity and secure information leaks is on the rise. Many of the security breaches are due to insecure access channels to the cloud. The security problem is likely to be exacerbated in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) era where billions of devices in our homes, offices and cars are digitally connected.

Distributed applications (such as web applications and cloud-based applications, where multiple computers cooperate to run the application) are becoming increasingly common. Given the amount of commercial activity and information handled by these distributed applications, it is important that these applications are correct, reliable, and efficient. However, many traditional tools and techniques for programmers cannot be used for distributed applications, making it difficult for programmers to write and debug distributed applications.

Recent trends in computing have prompted users and organizations to store an increasingly large amount of sensitive data at third party locations in the cloud outside of their direct control. In order to protect this data, it needs to be encrypted. However, traditional encryption systems lack the expressiveness needed for most applications involving big and complex data.