Jefferson's Wheel

Jiamin Chen and Peter Chapman have been recognized by the Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers Award. This is the premier national award for undergraduate researchers in computer science.

Peter was selected as the Runner-Up, and Jiamin Chen was selected as an Honorable Mention.

Congratulations to Jiamin and Peter!

[Added 9 Dec] Here’s the CRA Announcement:

Our paper on using generic garbled circuits to perform private set intersection is now available:

The paper develops three circuit designs for securely computing the intersection of two sets, where each set is the private input from one protocol participant. We show that for many scenarios, protocols built using only generic garbled circuit secure computation techniques can be competitive with the best custom-designed protocols for private set intersection.

Yan Huang will present the paper at NDSS in San Diego, in February 2012.

Our paper on Efficient Secure Computation with Garbled Circuits (by Yan Huang, Chih-hao Shen, David Evans, Jonathan Katz, and abhi shelat) is now available (Abstract, Paper [PDF, 21 pages]).

The paper is connected with a keynote talk I will give at the Seventh International Conference on Information Systems Security (ICISS 2011) in Kolkata (previously known as Calcutta), India on 17 December 2011.

Abstract. Secure two-party computation enables applications in which participants compute the output of a function that depends on their private inputs, without revealing those inputs or relying on any trusted third party. In this paper, we show the potential of building privacy-preserving applications using garbled circuits, a generic technique that until recently was believed to be too inefficient to scale to realistic problems. We present a Java-based framework that uses pipelining and circuit-level optimizations to build efficient and scalable privacy-preserving applications. Although the standard garbled circuit protocol assumes a very week, honest-but-curious adversary, techniques are available for converting such protocols to resist stronger adversaries, including fully malicious adversaries. We summarize approaches to producing malicious-resistant secure computations that reduce the costs of transforming a protocol to be secure against stronger adversaries. In addition, we summarize results on ensuring fairness, the property that either both parties receive the result or neither party does. Several open problems remain, but as theory and pragmatism advance, secure computation is approaching the point where it offers practical solutions for a wide variety of important problems.

Steve Huffman (BSCS 2005), co-founder of Reddit and Hipmunk, visited our lab yesterday. He was here for the Rice Hall Dedication.

SRG with Steve Huffman

I was invited by the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library to give a talk on talks for their in-service day (November 11). Giving a talk about giving talks is always a somewhat daunting, meta-circular task, but I guess I’ve learned a thing or two about this over the hundreds of talks I’ve given (and apparently what I did for them last year was good enough to get invited to do this).

A summary of the talk is here: Meta Talk: How to Give a Talk So Good You’ll Be Asked to Give Talks About Nothing (including the slides I used as PPTX and PDF).