Cryptographers have invented many different types of encryption. The PIs' research brings many of these under one umbrella, thereby reconceptualizing the landscape of modern cryptography. In the process, the research puts forward some entirely new kinds of encryption. The work is motivated by the needs of existing security practice. Sample questions include how to save space when storing encrypted copies of the same material in the cloud, and how to encrypt a credit-card number by reimagining the process as the shuffling of a deck of cards. The research demonstrates the practical benefits to cryptography and security from inclusive reinterpretations what encryption does.
In more detail, leaky encryption formalizes what it means to divulge some particular function of the message, unifying notions like blockciphers, online ciphers, and order-preserving encryption. Shuffle-based encryption creates blockciphers in a way fundamentally different from the way Feistel and SP networks do. Message-locked encryption can encrypt with a key derived from the message itself, to enable secure de-duplication. Password-based encryption incorporates a "salt" to provide what the PIs call multi-instance security. Circuit encryption can encrypt a circuit and its input to ciphertexts that permit the evaluation of the one on the other, but in a way that reveals only correctly computed result. These are just some of the aims the research encompasses.
