January 06, 2016 No meeting due to Real World Crypto workshop
January 13, 2016 Sustainable Banking - less greed, risk, toxic impacts, faster
Note: We will have a five-minute organizational meeting before the talk.
Speaker: Bruce Cahan (Consulting Professor, C&EE and MS&E)
Abstract: Banking has a culture problem, beyond myopia, lethargy and AIG = arrogance, ignorance and greed. Banks want to attract Millennials, and need a culture suited for transparency, innovation and responsible impacts. Valuation models based on past repeating patterns of economic demand and supply no longer reduce risk when technology disrupts old business models and global focus shifts from resource extraction to reuse. Governments are tired of rescuing the old models of banking and the financial innovations that replicate Ponzi Schemes as credit rated securities (think subprime mortgages and the Big Short).
Against this backdrop, Stanford has launched a Sustainable Banking Initiative to fundamentally reimagine what banking does, how to do it better and how to measure the value of assets used as collateral, so that the "real economy" wins, not just the financial economy.
January 20, 2016 Practical Order-Revealing Encryption with Limited Leakage
Speaker: David Wu
Abstract: In an order-preserving encryption scheme, the encryption algorithm produces ciphertexts that preserve the order of their plaintexts. Order-preserving encryption schemes have been studied extensively in the last decade, and yet not much is known about the security of these schemes. Recently, Boneh et al. (Eurocrypt 2015) introduced a generalization of order-preserving encryption, called order-revealing encryption, and presented a construction which achieves this notion with best-possible security. Because their construction relies on multilinear maps, it is too impractical for most applications and therefore remains a theoretical result.
In this talk, I will introduce a new efficiently-implementable order-revealing encryption (ORE) scheme based on pseudorandom functions (PRFs). I will also describe a new simulation-based security notion defined with respect to a specific leakage function that allows us to precisely quantify the information leakage in our new encryption scheme. With this set of new security definitions, we not only have a firm understanding of the information leakage, but also are able to show that our new ORE construction provides provably stronger security guarantees compared to existing OPE schemes.
Joint work with: Nathan Chenette, Kevin Lewi, and Steve Weis
January 27, 2016 Security and consensus, or Watch Joe's job talk and help him choose a better title
Note: This will be a 45-minute talk.
Speaker: Joe Bonneau
Abstract: Traditionally, cryptography aims to reduce security to computational assumptions: the system is secure as long as attackers can't guess a random key or solve a hard mathematical problem. Larger cryptographic systems require a more holistic approach as security often relies critically on user actions and economic incentives. I'll discuss my work on passwords, secure messaging tools and cryptocurrencies and highlight the exciting new era of building security protocols using data structures with global consensus.
February 03, 2016 Optimizing Operating Systems for the Datacenter
Note: This will be a 45-minute talk.
Speaker: Adam Belay
Abstract: TBD
February 10, 2016 CESEL: Securing a Mote for 20 Years
Speaker: Kevin Kiningham
Abstract: Embedded wireless sensors, once deployed, may remain in active use for decades. At the same time, as motes come to dominate both the number of hosts and data traffic of the Internet, their security will become fundamental to general Internet security. This paper argues that the next generation of embedded networked sensor devices ("motes") should consider this tension in their basic design and be designed to remain secure for 20 years in a rapidly changing and evolving security and cryptographic landscape.
The key insight in this paper is that the economics of modern system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs provides ample space for hardware accelerators and cryptographic engines. A next generation mote can therefore include many such co-processors and features at almost no production cost. The paper describes an initial design for what hardware security support such a device should have, focusing on five hardware primitives: an atomic, unique counter, a random number generator based on physical entropy, additional instructions to accelerate symmetric ciphers, an elliptic curve accelerator, and support for modular polynomial multiplication used in post-quantum cryptographic signing algorithms. We call this architecture CESEL.
February 17, 2016 Implementing Order-Revealing Encryption
Speaker: Kevin Lewi
Abstract: In an order-revealing encryption scheme, there is a public decryption procedure that, given two encryptions of numbers, reveals their underlying order. Boneh et al. (Eurocrypt 2015) recently presented the first implementable construction of order-revealing encryption from multilinear maps.
In this talk, I'll discuss our attempts to implement this construction, which also applies to the more general primitive known as multi-input functional encryption. The end goal is to create an encryption "challenge" to inspire future work in the cryptanalysis of multilinear maps, which could help us to better understand the concrete parameters needed for multilinear maps in order to achieve real-world security.
February 24, 2016 Using Modern FPGAs for Public-Key Crypto
Speaker: Riad Wahby
Abstract: Modern field programmable gate arrays include more than just lookup tables, flip-flops, and interconnect: they also support "hard" functionality like dedicated ALUs, SRAMs, high-speed IO transceivers, and DRAM controllers. I'll present a quick case study on leveraging this functionality for building a public key crypto accelerator with application to verifiable outsourcing of computations. Along the way, we'll see some cool bit twiddling for fast multiplication, modular reduction, and (multi-)exponentiation.
March 02, 2016 No Lunch -- RSA Conference
March 09, 2016 Q&A with Martin Hellman
Speaker: Martin Hellman (EE)
March 16, 2016 No Lunch -- Spring Break
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March 22, 2016 No Lunch -- Spring Break
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