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NJIT Applied Mathematics Colloquium

Friday, February 4 2011, 11:30am
Cullimore Lecture Hall II
New Jersey Institute of Technology

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Efficient Protocols for Private Information Sharing

Stanislaw Jarecki

UC Irvine

Progress in sharing and organization of information is making revolutionary changes in our world. However, information-sharing can also create privacy and security problems with unforeseen consequences. By the celebrated result of Andrew Yao from 1982 on general cryptographically-secure computation, we know that cryptography enables us to convert any information-sharing application into its privacy-protecting variant which computes the same output while hiding all information about any party's private inputs. Unfortunately, the cost of this general conversion is usually prohibitive in practice. Therefore, in light of the explosive growth of information-sharing technology, it is interesting to ask if we can construct cryptographic protocols for specific common information-sharing scenarios which would provide the same input-privacy guarantees of Yao's secure computation, but which would be efficient enough in practice. In this talk we show recent examples of such protocols, including private database search, private set intersection, and private discovery of cryptographic credentials.