Abstract:

Information is one of the most precious assets. It is particularly valuable when it is structured, searchable, and shared.  At the same time, collection, storage, correlation and sharing of information, especially across ownership domains, may break business models, pose significant privacy, security and compliance risks, and is often illegal.

In his talk, Kolesnikov will introduce secure multi-party computation (MPC), the area of cryptography that reconciles the fundamental conflict between data utility and privacy. Often described as “computation under encryption, ”MPC allows evaluating arbitrary functions on private inputs, guaranteeing that each party learns nothing beyond its intended output.

Kolesnikov will sketch the state-of-the-art of practical MPC, focusing on several effective techniques. He will present Blind Seer, which is a database management system that implements access control, data protection, and hides the SQL query from the server. He will also discuss promising research that could define how sensitive data is stored and processed.

Bio:

Vladimir Kolesnikov is a cryptography and security researcher at Bell Labs.

In 2006, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. His main research interest is improving and applying secure computation and crypto techniques. 

He has authored several papers on garbled circuits, homomorphic encryption, related techniques, and applications. He is interested in database security and privacy, key exchange and channel security.

Kolesnikov has been involved in the design and analysis of Smart Grid Networks, Storage Area Networks, wireless and biometric authentication, and other secure systems. His work has been supported by IARPA and ONR grants.