Functional Encryption represents a new vision for designing cryptosystems that simultaneously achieve flexible data sharing and strong security. Using a functional encryption scheme, a data owner can specify an access policy that will be enforced by the encryption scheme itself, allowing only authorized users to decrypt. In this talk, I will present functional encryption schemes supporting expressive access policies while retaining provable security guarantees against powerful adversaries. In particular, I will describe a new decentralized system enabling data encryption across different trust domains.
Allison Bishop Lewko is a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England. She completed her Ph.D. in computer science at The University of Texas at Austin in May 2012. She received her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Princeton University and a masters in mathematics from The University of Cambridge. Much of her research is focused on developing advanced cryptosystems with strong security guarantees, though she is also active in the areas of complexity theory, distributed computing, harmonic analysis, and combinatorics.