Abstract:

Man-in-the-Middle (MiM) attacks are one of the most common attacks in cryptography and refer to the setting where an adversary sits on the communication channel between two parties and tampers with any message in an arbitrary way. The goal of non-malleable cryptography is to develop fundamental tools to protect against MiM attacks. Perhaps the most fundamental of these tools is what is called as non-malleable commitments. Constructions of non-malleable commitments are foundational to several other areas of cryptography such as secure multi-party computation, and, composable secure computation.

In this talk, I will cover recent progress in designing non-malleable commitments and the notion of non-malleable commitments, their central role in non-malleable cryptography, recent results, and a flavor of the new techniques involved. In addition, I will explain some of their applications including a few outside of cryptography.

Bio:

Dr. Vipul Goyal is a researcher at Microsoft Research, India. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2010, and received his bachelor's in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi. Goyal possesses wide interests in all areas of cryptography, security and privacy, and theoretical computer science.

Dr. Goyal has won honors such as a Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship, Google Outstanding Graduate Student award, and in 2013, he was named to the Forbes magazine's 30 under 30 list. His research has received media coverage in popular science publications such as MIT's "Technology Review", "Slashdot", and "Nature" news. Goyal has given lectures at institutions such as MIT, Princeton, and, IIT Delhi. In addition, he regularly served on program committees of cryptography conferences such as Crypto, Eurocrypt, and TCC. He also holds two international patents and has published more than 50 technical papers at conferences including Crypto, Eurocrypt, STOC, FOCS, and, ACM CCS.