26 Cryptographic Systems for Data Security 🔐

Talk summary: Theft of confidential data is prevalent. In most applications, confidential data is stored at servers. Thus, existing systems naturally try to prevent adversaries from compromising these servers. However, experience has shown that adversaries still find a way to break in and steal the data.

In this talk, Popa, R. A. describes a new approach to protect data confidentiality even when attackers get access to all server data: building practical systems that compute on encrypted data without access to the decryption key. In this setting, she designed and built a database system (CryptDB), a web application platform (Mylar), and two mobile systems, as well as developed new cryptographic schemes for them. Popa, R. A. showed that these systems support a wide range of applications with low overhead. This talk focuses primarily on Mylar with a glimpse to upcoming work how to aid with an end-to-end solution for securing the Internet-of things.


Bio: Raluca Ada Popa completed her Ph.D. at MIT and is starting as an assistant professor of computer science at UC Berkeley. She is interested in security, systems, and applied cryptography. Raluca developed practical systems (such as CryptDB and Mylar) that protect data confidentiality by computing over encrypted data, as well as designed new encryption schemes that underlie these systems. Some of her work has had early impact, with Google applying CryptDB’s design to their SQL-like BigQuery service and Boston’s Newton-Wellesley hospital using Mylar to secure their medical application. Raluca is the recipient of a George Sprowls award for best CS Ph.D. thesis at MIT, Google PhD Fellowship, Johnson award for best CS Masters of Engineering thesis from MIT, and CRA Outstanding undergraduate award from the ACM.