CS 2950-v: Topics in Applied Cryptography (Fall ‘18)

(New) Meeting Time: TTh 9:00-10:20 AM
Location: CIT 506
Instructor: Seny Kamara (seny@brown.edu)
Office hours: Thursdays 4-5PM, CIT 507

Description: This course surveys recent developments in applied cryptography. Research in this field is motivated by privacy and security issues that arise in practice from areas like cloud computing, databases, surveillance and finance. Topics will vary each year.

Prerequisites: CSCI 1660 required; CSCI 1510 strongly recommended.

Syllabus: pdf

Overview

Topics (tentative)

1. Encrypted (search) algorithms
2. Surveillance
3. Secure multi-party computation
4. Misc (steganography, password managers, …)

There is no textbook required for this course but students may find Introduction to Modern Cryptography by Katz and Lindell helpful to gain familiarity with cryptography. Other recommended (free) resources include Introduction to Modern Cryptography by Bellare and Rogaway and Course in Cryptography by Pass and Shelat.

Schedule

Sept. 06 (Th): Overview (Seny)

Sept. 11 (Tu): Introduction to Cryptography (Seny)

• Introduction to Cryptography & Provable Security
  CSCI 2950v 2016

Sept. 13 (Th): Introduction to Encrypted Search (Seny)

• S. Kamara
  Encrypted Search
  ACM Crossroads 2015

• S. Kamara
  Structured Encryption
  CSCI 2950v 2016

Sept. 18 (Tu): Introduction to Encrypted Search (Seny)

• S. Kamara
  Encrypted Search
  ACM Crossroads 2015

• S. Kamara
  Structured Encryption
  CSCI 2950v 2016

Sept. 20 (Th): Leakage Attacks (Seny)

• D. Cash, P. Grubbs, J. Perry, T. Ristenpart
  Leakage-Abuse Attacks Against Searchable Encryption
  CCS ‘15

Sept. 25 (Tu): Leakage Suppression (Tarik)

• S. Kamara, T. Moataz, O. Ohrimenko
  Structured Encryption and Leakage Suppression
  CRYPTO ‘18

Sept. 27 (Th): Differentially-private access patterns (Archita)

• G. Chen, T.-H. Lai, M. K. Reiter, and Y. Zhang
  Differentially private access patterns for searchable symmetric encryption

Oct. 02 (Tu): I/O efficiency (Seny)

• G. Asharov, G. Segev, Ido Shahaf
  Tight Tradeoffs in Searchable Symmetric Encryption
  CRYPTO ‘18

• (optional) I. Demrtzis, D. Papadopoulos, C. Papamanthou
  Searchable Encryption with Optimal Locality: Achieving Sublogarithmic Read Efficiency
  CRYPTO ‘18

Oct. 04 (Th): Encrypted database systems (Seny)

• S. Hilgard, W. Qin
  OpAwesome: The Good, the Bad, and the Fuzzy in the Secure Database Landscape

• D. Archer, D. Bogdanov, L. Kamm, Y. Lindell, K. Nielsen, J. Illeborg Pagter, N. Smart, R. N. Wright
  From Keys to Databases – Real-World Applications of Secure Multi-Party Computation

• (background) Raluca Ada Popa, Catherine M. S. Redfield, Nickolai Zeldovich, and Hari Balakrishnan
  CryptDB: Protecting Confidentiality with Encrypted Query Processing
  ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP)

• (background) M. Naveed, S. Kamara, C. Wright
  Inference Attacks Against Property-Preserving Encrypted Databases
  CCS ‘15

• (optional) V. Pappas, F. Krell, B. Vo, V. Kolesnikov, T. Malkin, S. G. Choi, W. George, A. Keromytis, S. Bellovin
  Blind Seer: A Scalable Private DBMS
  IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (S&P ‘14)

Oct. 09 (Tu): The Brown Encrypted Database System (Sam)

Oct. 11 (Th): Introduction to Surveillance (Seny)

• (background) F. Cate (Chair), D. Boneh, F. Chang, S. Charney, S. Goldwasser, D. Hoffman, S. Kamara, D. Kris, S. Landau, S. Lipner, R. Littlehale, K. Martin, H. Rishikof, P. Weinberger.
  National Academies Consensus Report: Decrypting the Encryption Debate

Oct. 16 (Tu): Ray Ozzie’s CLEAR Proposal (Seny)

• R. Ozzie
  CLEAR
  Manuscript

• S. Levy
  Cracking the Crypto War
  Wired

Oct. 18 (Th): Stefan Savage’s Proposal (Sacha)

• S. Savage
  Lawful Device Access without Mass Surveillance Risk: A Technical Design Discussion
  CCS ‘18

Oct. 23 (Tu): Crypto Crumple Zones (Archer)

• C. Wright, M. Varia
  Crypto Crumple Zones: Enabling Limited Access Without Mass Surveillance
  Euro S&P ‘18

Oct. 25 (Th): Accountability (Lilika)

• J. Frankle, S. Park, D. Shaar, S. Goldwasser, D. J. Weitzner
  AUDIT: Practical Accountability of Secret Processes
  Usenix Security ‘18

• S. Goldwasser, S. Park
  Public Accountability vs. Secret Laws: Can They Coexist?
  Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES) ‘17

Oct. 30 (Tu): Discussion

Nov. 01 (Th): Deniable Encryption and Steganography (Andrew)

• R. Anderson, R. Needham, A. Shamir
  The Steganographic File System
  International Workshop on Information Hiding ‘98

• Andrew D. McDonald and Markus G. Kuhn
  StegFS: A Steganographic File System for Linux
  Information Hiding ‘99

Nov. 06 (Tu): Canceled

Nov. 08 (Th): Crypto and the Fifth Amendment (Seny)

• A. Cohen and S. Park
  Compelled Decryption and the Fifth Amendment: Exploring the Technical Boundaries
  Harvard Journal of Law and Technology (JOLT)

• O. Kerr
  Compelled Decryption and the Privilege Against Self-Incrimination
  Texas Law Review

Nov. 13 (Tu): Introduction to MPC (Seny)

Nov. 15 (Th): Introduction to MPC (Seny)

Nov. 20 (Tu): SPDZ (Seny)

• I. Damgard, V. Pastro, N. Smart, S. Zakarias
  Multiparty Computation from Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption
  CRYPTO ‘12

• Marcel Keller and Valerio Pastro, Dragos Rotaru
  Overdrive: Making SPDZ Great Again
  Eurocrypt ‘18

Nov. 22 (Th): Thanksgiving

Nov. 27 (Tu): Filecoin (Daniel)

• Protocol Labs
  Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network

Nov. 29 (Th): Solidus (Jonathan)

• E. Chechetti, F. Zhang, Y. Ji, A. Khosba, A. Juels, E. Shi
  Solidus: Confidential Distributed Ledger Transactions via PVORM CCS ‘17

Dec. 04 (Tu): Project Presentations

Dec. 06 (Th): Project Presentations