Side Channels and Clouds: New Challenges in Cryptography

Emerging trends in computation such as cloud computing, virtualization and trusted computing require that computation be carried out in remote and hostile environments, where attackers have unprecedented access to the devices, the data and the programs. This poses new challenges for cryptography. Vinod Vaikuntanathan of the MIT/IBM T.J. Watson Research Center recently spoke at the University of Washington, sharing his recent work in solving two of these new challenges, side-channel attacks and computing on encrypted data.