IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM

7:00 PM, Thursday, 30 April 2015

MIT Room 32-G449 (Kiva)

Computing on Encrypted Data

Vinod Vaikuntanathan

The basic nature of encryption has always been all-or-nothing: anyone who knows the secret key can decode and recover the entire data; but, without the key, nothing can be revealed. The requirements of our modern computing world raise fundamentally new challenges: Can we compute on encrypted data without decrypting it, and without knowledge of the secret key? Which functions can be computed this way? Who can learn the results of such computations? In this talk, I will present homomorphic encryption and functional encryption schemes, two powerful methods of computing on encrypted data.

Vinod Vaikuntanathan joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in September 2013. After receiving a S.M. and Ph.D. from MIT, he spent two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at IBM T.J. Watson, one year as a researcher at Microsoft Redmond, and two years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. He is broadly interested in cryptography, security and distributed algorithms. His current research focus in cryptography is in developing technologies for computing on encrypted data, guaranteeing privacy of sensitive data while at the same time enabling computations on it. His work has been recognized with many awards including the George M. Sprowls Ph.D. Thesis Award at MIT, an IBM Josef Raviv Postdoctoral Fellowship, a University of Toronto Connaught Foundation Award, and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship.

This joint meeting of the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer and GBC/ACM will be held in MIT Room 32-G449 (the Kiva conference room on the 4th floor of the Stata Center, buildng 32 on MIT maps) .  You can see it on this map of the MIT campus.

Up-to-date information about this and other talks is available online at https://ewh.ieee.org/r1/boston/computer/. You can sign up to receive updated status information about this talk and informational emails about future talks at https://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/ieee-cs, our self-administered mailing list.

Updated: Feb 23, 2015.