Invited Speakers

Alfred Menezes
Department of Combinatorics & Optimization
University of Waterloo, Canada

Title: Another Look at Tightness

Abstract:
Reductionist security proofs for cryptographic protocols are often described in an asymptotic setting, where the adversary is assumed to be polynomially bounded. When fixed-sized parameters are considered, little or no assurances may be provided if these proofs are not tight. We revisit the question of whether non-tight reductionist security proofs guarantee the security of protocols that are deployed using parameters that would make sense if the proofs were tight.

This is joint work with Sanjit Chatterjee and Palash Sarkar.

Bio:
Alfred Menezes is a professor in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada. His research interests are in curve-based cryptography, key agreement protocols, provable security, and algorithmic number theory. He is co-author of the "Handbook of Applied Cryptography" and "Guide to Elliptic Curve Cryptography".

Kristin Lauter
Principal Researcher, Cryptography Group
Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

Title: Cryptographic Techniques for Securing the Cloud

Abstract: With the prospect of increasing amounts of data being collected by a proliferation of internet-connected devices, and the task of organizing, storing, and accessing such data looming, we face the challenge of how to leverage the power of the cloud running in our data centers to make information accessible in a secure and privacy-preserving manner. For many scenarios, in other words, we would like to have a public cloud which we can trust with our private data, and yet we would like to have that data still be accessible to us in an organized and useful way. This is especially important for sensitive data such as medical or financial records. This talk will highlight emerging cryptographic techniques which can help to secure the cloud. New solutions for searchable encryption and fully homomorphic encryption are becoming more efficient and provide the foundation for cloud storage and services on encrypted data.

This talk will cover various joint work with Seny Kamara, Vinod Vaikuntanathan, and Michael Naehrig.

Bio:
Kristin Lauter is a Principal Researcher and Manager of the Cryptography Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. Lauter received her BA, MS, and PhD, all in mathematics, from the University of Chicago, in 1990, 1991, and 1996, respectively. She was T.H. Hildebrandt Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan (1996-1999), visiting scholar at Max Planck Institut fur Mathematik in Bonn, Germany (1997), and at Institut de Mathematiques Luminy in France (1999). In 2008, Lauter, together with her coauthors, was awarded the Selfridge Prize in Computational Number Theory.