On Deploying Secure Computation Protocols in Daily Business Applications

Date and Time: March 25, 11 AM – 12 PM AEDT (March 24, 8 PM – 9 PM EDT).

Recording: https://webcast.csiro.au/#/videos/b985ccd1-788c-452a-a419-d9f8ad3b3d23

Guest Speaker: Dr. Moti Yung, Google Research, New York, USA.

Moti Yung is a Security and Privacy Research Scientist with Google. He got his PhD from Columbia University in 1988. Previously, he was with IBM Research, Certco, RSA Laboratories, and Snap. He has also been an adjunct senior research faculty at Columbia, where he has co-advised and worked with PhD students. His contributions to research and development treat science and technology holistically: from the theoretical mathematical foundations, via conceptual mechanisms, to applied cryptography, and to participation in developing actual industrial products.

Yung is a fellow of the IEEE, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). In 2010 he gave the IACR Distinguished Lecture. He is the recipient of the 2014 ACM’s SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation award, and the 2014 ESORICS (European Symposium on Research in Computer Security). In 2018 he received the IEEE-CS W. Wallace McDowell Award. In 2020 he received the test-of-time award for a paper predicting ransomware co-authored in 1996 in IEEE’s Symposium on Security and Privacy; also in 2020 he received the IACR’s PKC conference test-of-time award for a paper he co-authored in 1998. In 2021 he received the IEEE-CS Computer Pioneer Award.

Abstract:

The area of Secure Computation Protocols are the third generation of modern cryptography, where Symmetric Key Encryption was the first generation, and Public Key Cryptography was the second one. The area started with the Mental Poker protocol in the late 70s, has been a theoretical research area for 40 years, with more applied protocols in recent years.

In this talk I will cover an effort that led to the first cryptographic protocols working routinely in business applications, employing secure computation (rather than the typical secure communication). I will argue why our time is technologically the right setting for adopting secure computation, and how we approached the deployment. The talk will explain the why and how, and also some of the technical developments that were needed to design the protocol to actual business needs and performance requirements, allowing two companies to compute on shared data results that are critical to business, while keeping the inputs otherwise mutually private.