Stanford Security Lunch

Abstract: As more data moves to the cloud, privacy protection is becoming increasingly crucial in the field of databases. While much of the research in this area has focused on encryption-based solutions for _private_ databases, relatively little attention has been paid to provide privacy for querying _public_ or server-controlled databases where a user cannot encrypt the data. In this talk, I will discuss this underserved area and share recent results on private point queries over public key-value databases. I will also discuss how this problem builds on and is related to an area in cryptography called Private Information Retrieval or PIR. I will conclude my talk with open problems in this area and potential directions for future research.

Bio: Trinabh Gupta is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at UCSB. His research focus is on large-scale, privacy-preserving computer systems. He has spent over ten years working in this area. Besides, he has gained valuable industry and startup experience through a Chief Scientist and advisor role at a privacy-focused startup called Data Secrets, Inc., and a privacy consultant role at VERA security, Inc. (acquired by HelpSystems, Inc.). Prior to joining UCSB, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the security and privacy research group at Microsoft Research, Redmond. He received his PhD from UT Austin and bachelors from IIT Delhi, both in computer science.