iThe basic nature of encryption has always been all-or-nothing: anyone who knows the secret key can decode and recover the entire data; but, without the key, nothing can be revealed. The requirements of our modern computing world raise fundamentally new challenges: Can we compute on encrypted data without decrypting it, and without knowledge of the secret key? Which functions can be computed this way? Who can learn the results of such computations? In this talk, I will present homomorphic encryption and functional encryption schemes, two powerful methods of computing on encrypted data.
This is a joint meeting of the Boston Chapter of the GBC/ACM and IEEE Computer.
Vinod Vaikuntanathan joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in September 2013. After receiving a S.M. and Ph.D. from MIT, he spent two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at IBM T.J. Watson, one year as a researcher at Microsoft Redmond, and two years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. He is broadly interested in cryptography, security and distributed algorithms. His current research focus in cryptography is in developing technologies for computing on encrypted data, guaranteeing privacy of sensitive data while at the same time enabling computations on it. His work has been recognized with many awards including the George M. Sprowls Ph.D. Thesis Award at MIT, an IBM Josef Raviv Postdoctoral Fellowship, a University of Toronto Connaught Foundation Award, and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship.
