Privacy is an important concern in the digital age, yet the adoption of privacy preserving technologies has lagged behind that of other security technologies. This is, to a great extent, due to the lack of practical, usable privacy preserving technologies. The wide adoption of confidentiality and integrity technologies was triggered by a few practical software tools, such as SSL and SSH. By contrast, practical privacy preserving technologies still face considerable challenges.
The goal of this project is to develop two practical privacy preserving technologies, which serve as a case study on unique requirements and pitfalls of privacy preserving software.
Privacy preserving computation: Generic techniques are close to practical for some functions of interest, but a tantalizing gap still remains for many applications. The practicality gap widens further if malicious adversarial behavior must be tolerated. This project focus on new efficient methods to protect against malicious faults, retro-fitting at the algorithmic level to gain new efficiencies at the cryptographic protocol level, and new efficient methods to facilitate the ongoing storage and processing of privacy-sensitive data.
Off-the-record communication: This project will design protocols for off-the-record communication between group members. Each member can verify the identity of the sender and ensure the confidentiality of the message, but no subset of group members may conspire to implicate the sender to any third party.
Broader impacts of this project are to inform the general public that privacy is not a lost cause in the digital age, and to create public appreciation and support for applied cryptography research.
