Minimal Trusted Hardware Assumptions for Privacy-Preserving Systems
Aniket Kate
Saarland University
SWS Colloquium
Aniket Kate is a junior faculty member and an independent research group
leader at Saarland University in Germany, where he is heading the
Cryptographic Systems research group within the Cluster of Excellence.
His primary research interests lie at the intersection of cryptography,
and systems security research. Along with producing theoretically
elegant cryptographic results, he endeavors to make them useful in
real-world scenarios. Before joining Saarland University in 2012, Aniket
was a postdoctoral researcher at Max Planck Institute for Software
Systems (MPI-SWS), Germany. He received his PhD from the University of
Waterloo, Canada in 2010, and his masters from Indian Institute of
Technology (IIT) - Bombay, India in 2006.
Trusted hardware modules are becoming prevalent in computing devices of
all kinds. A broad trusted hardware assumption purports to solve almost
all security problems in a trivial and uninteresting manner. However,
relying entirely on hardware assumptions to achieve security goals of a
system can be impractical given the limited memory, bandwidth and CPU
capabilities of available hardware modules, and makes the designed
system vulnerable to even a tiny overlooked or undiscovered
flaw/side-channel in the employed module. Thus, the key challenge to me
while designing a trusted hardware-based system is to determine a
minimal hardware assumption required to achieve the system's goals, and
justify the assumption for an available hardware module.
In this talk, I will present my recent work on developing
privacy-preserving systems based on the above insight. In particular, I
will introduce a privacy-preserving transaction protocol for credit
networks (PrivPay), an architecture for privacy-preserving online
behavioral advertising (ObliviAd), and an asynchronous multiparty
computation protocol with only an honest majority (NeqAMPC).