Jefferson’s Wheel

I gave a talk today at the University of Richmond on secure computation, targeted to a general audience. [Richmond Abstract Page]

Two-party secure computation allows two parties to compute a function that depends on inputs from both parties, but reveals nothing except the output of the function. A general solution to this problem have been known since Andrew Yao's pioneering work on garbled circuits in the 1980s, but only recently has it become conceivable to use this approach in real systems. This talk will provide an introduction to secure computation, and describe the work we are doing at UVa to make secure computation efficient and scalable enough to build real applications. The talk assumes no prior background in cryptography, and should be understandable all computing students.

Slides: [PDF] [PPTX]

For more, see: MightBeEvil.com

I gave a keynote talk on our secure computation work at the Seventh International Conference on Information Systems Security (ICISS) in Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. 17 December 2011.

More Photos

Talk Slides: [PPTX] [PDF]

I was invited by the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library to give a talk on talks for their in-service day (November 11). Giving a talk about giving talks is always a somewhat daunting, meta-circular task, but I guess I’ve learned a thing or two about this over the hundreds of talks I’ve given (and apparently what I did for them last year was good enough to get invited to do this).

A summary of the talk is here: Meta Talk: How to Give a Talk So Good You’ll Be Asked to Give Talks About Nothing (including the slides I used as PPTX and PDF).

Yikan Chen presented his work on Auditing Information Leakage for Distance Metrics at the Third IEEE Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust today.

The slides are here: [PPTX] [PDF]

Here are the slides from my talk in cs6190, our seminar for new graduate students: [PPTX] [PDF]

Links from the talk:

• http://www.mightbeevil.com — secure computation with garbled circuits
• CommonContacts Android Secure Computation Demo
• Research group mailing list
• Publications

Yuchen Zhou presented Protecting Private Web Content from Embedded Scripts at ESORICS in Belgium.

His talk slides are here: [PPTX] [PDF]

Videos from all the talks at USENIX Security are now available on the conference site.

Here are the talks by UVa people:

• Peter Chapman (HotSec Workshop): Privacy-Preserving Applications on Smartphones and Q & A (extensive discussion session, including the other two talks in the session)
• Pieter Hooimeijer: Fast and Precise Sanitizer Analysis with BEK
• Adrienne Porter Felt (now at UC Berkeley): Permission Re-Delegation: Attacks and Defenses
• Michael Dietz (now at Rice University): QUIRE: Lightweight Provenance for Smart Phone Operating Systems
• Yan Huang: Faster Secure Two-Party Computation Using Garbled Circuits

I would also highly recommend Collin Jackson’s invited talk on Crossing the Chasm: Pitching Security Research to Mainstream Browser Vendors.

Yan Huang’s talk on Faster Secure Two-Party Computation Using Garbled Circuits at USENIX Security 2011 is now available: [PPTX] [PDF].

You can also download our framework and try our Android demo application.

Peter Chapman presented our paper on Privacy-Preserving Applications on Smartphones at the 6th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Security today. Here are the talk slides [PDF].

The CommonContacts demonstration app is now available in the Android Market.

Project Website

Yan Huang presented Private Editing Using Untrusted Cloud Services at the Second International Workshop on Security and Privacy in Cloud Computing in Minneapolis this morning.

Here are the slides from his talk: [PPTX, PDF].

The full paper is also available: [PDF, 10 pages].