Believing without Seeing: Cryptographic Integrity Guarantees in Outsourced Computation

Speaker:        Dimitrios Papadopoulos
                Boston University

Title:          "Believing without Seeing: Cryptographic Integrity
                 Guarantees in Outsourced Computation"

Date:           Monday, 7 March 2016

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theater F (near lifts 25 & 26), HKUST

Abstract:

An integral component of modern computing is the ability to outsource data
and computation to powerful remote servers. But this model of interaction
also introduces new security issues, as one's data no longer resides
within their "zone of trust". In particular, how can a party be assured
that an outsourced computation was performed correctly by the remote
server?

I will discuss cryptographic protocols that achieve integrity of
computation. These protocols accompany each computation with a short and
efficiently verifiable proof of correctness. Existing constructions in the
literature typically come in two flavors: general-purpose schemes that can
verify any computation but entail very high overheads for the server, and
function-specific schemes that are more efficient, but only target limited
functionalities. My approach takes the best of both worlds: I use
function-specific schemes as building blocks, and compose these building
blocks by leveraging ideas from the general-purpose approaches. This
results in constructions that enjoy the low overheads of function-specific
schemes, while providing significantly more expressiveness. Finally, I
will show that the problem of securing the domain name system (DNS) is at
its core a problem of integrity of outsourced computation, and present our
design and implementation of NSEC5, a proposal for augmenting the security
of DNS


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Biography:

Dimitrios Papadopoulos is a PhD candidate in the Computer Science
Department of Boston University, and a member of the BU Security Group. He
received his Diploma in Applied Mathematics in 2010 from the National
Technical University of Athens, Greece. He has worked as a research intern
at IBM Zurich and Verisign Labs. His research interests are on applied
cryptography, network security, and secure cloud computing.