Abstract: Cryptography, originally the art of facilitating secret communication, has now evolved to enable a variety of secure tasks. Some fundamental challenges that modern cryptography addresses are: Can we prevent adversaries from tampering with encrypted communication? Can we verify that computation is performed correctly while preserving the privacy of data on which computation occurs? Can we enable mutually distrusting participants to jointly compute on distributed private data? In this talk, I will discuss my research that builds non-interactive secure protocols to accomplish these tasks, based on widely believed cryptographic hardness assumptions. I will also present new techniques that overcome known barriers and enable secure protocols that were previously believed to be impossible. These techniques have made it possible to achieve non-malleability, strong variants of zero-knowledge, or other security properties while requiring only a single message from each participant.
Bio: Dakshita Khurana is a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science Department at UCLA, where she is co-advised by Rafail Ostrovsky and Amit Sahai. She is currently supported by the UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship and is a recipient of the Cisco Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award. She obtained her Masters from UCLA in 2014, and Bachelors from IIT Delhi in 2012. She is interested in all aspects of cryptography, with a special emphasis on the design of secure protocols.
A reception for attendees will be held at 3:30 p.m. in CS 150
Faculty Host: Gerome Miklau