Dana Dachman-Soled

Title: Cryptography Against Physical Attacks: Recent Results and New Directions

Physical attacks compromise the security of a system by exploiting physical properties of implementations. These implementation-specific attacks, such as timing attacks and fault-induction attacks, have been launched successfully on real-life cryptosystems such as RSA, revealing a significant vulnerability of these systems. Until recently, physical attacks have been dealt with in an ad-hoc manner. In recent years, however, much attention in the cryptographic community has focused on how to model physical attacks and construct cryptographic schemes that are provably secure in these strong models.

In this talk, we present our recent results related to constructing cryptographic schemes resilient to leakage and tampering attacks. First, we present results on “circuit compilers” for tampering, which allow us to take any circuit and convert it into a modified circuit which has strong tamper-resilience properties. Next, we consider constructing protocols for performing computations in an untrusted, distributed setting, where an attacker may additionally launch leakage attacks on honest parties. In the final part of the talk, we discuss directions for current and future research.

Charalampos (Babis) Papamanthou

In the age of big data, cloud computing plays a major role in processing and analyzing massive amounts of information. Services like Amazon S3 and EC2 offer easily accessible outsourced storage and computation, gradually replacing our local hard drives and desktop machines. Nevertheless, many security concerns have arisen in this new paradigm. In an untrusted cloud setting, users' data and computations can be potentially tampered with and sensitive data could be leaked to unauthorized parties.

In this talk, I will present some of my work that tackles the above mentioned problems through protocols and systems that offer verifiability and privacy assurances of data and computations in the cloud (or generally in untrusted environments). Specifically I will review some of my work on securing storage applications efficiently and on applied cryptographic techniques for verifying more expressive queries than simple storage queries. I will also show that my protocols are efficient both in theory and in practice and conclude by highlighting some of my recent work on cloud privacy concerning efficient and parallel searching of dynamic encrypted data and by summarizing future research directions.