Join faculty from the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science for short talks on security.

Speakers:

• Ron Rivest, Welcome Remarks
   
• Vinod Vaikuntanathan, Encrypted Computation: "Can you compute on data while it remains encrypted?” This fascinating question was first asked at MIT in 1978, resulting in the conceptualization of the notion of fully homomorphic encryption. I will talk about 15 years of research building fully homomorphic encryption systems, and the many challenges that lie ahead.
   
• Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, Private Search: This talk will discuss the design of a new privacy-protecting search engine — one that can answer a client’s search query without ever seeing it. While the idea of a “private Google search” has been a dream of cryptographers for many years, recent developments at MIT and elsewhere have finally made it a (near) reality. I will present the state of the art in private search, along with exciting directions for future work.
   
• Yael Kalai, Verification of Computation: Efficient verification of computation is fundamental to computer science. Recently it has had growing practical significance, especially with the increasing popularity of blockchain technologies and cloud computing. In this talk, I will present schemes for verifying the correctness of a computation and I will discuss both their practical aspects and their impact on areas such as cryptography, quantum complexity, hardness of approximation, and the complexity of finding a Nash equilibrium.
   
• Nickolai Zeldovich, Verification on Hardware: Hardware security modules, such as USB security keys used for two-factor authentication, are a powerful approach for providing strong security even if other parts of the system are vulnerable or compromised. This approach critically depends on the hardware security modules themselves being implemented correctly and securely, but experience shows that developers make a wide range of mistakes, ranging from software bugs, to hardware issues, to subtle data leaks through timing channels. This talk will present recent research results on using formal verification to develop provably-secure implementations of hardware security modules.

Part of the Expanding Horizons in Computing IAP series presented by the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. See the full list of activities at computing.mit.edu/ExpandingHorizons.