12 Jan 2015, Computing on Encrypted Data - Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption

Summary of Talk: By equipping everyday devices with sensors and connecting them to the Internet, the Internet of Things opens up many exciting new applications. At the same time, however, the vast amount of data that is being collected and offloaded to the cloud poses a significant privacy risk. In this talk, I give a high-level overview of some of the existing cryptographic tools for privacy-preserving computation. I then focus on somewhat and fully homomorphic encryption, a powerful cryptographic primitive that has generated significant interest in the research community in the last few years. Finally, I show some experimental results on applying somewhat homomorphic encryption to performing elementary statistical analysis as well as private information retrieval in the cloud. Author Bio: David Wu is currently a second-year PhD student at Stanford working with Dan Boneh on problems in applied cryptography. Currently, his research is focused on developing practical privacy-preserving protocols for the cloud. He is currently supported by an NSF Graduate Research fellowship.