Functional Encryption: Beyond Public Key Cryptography
Brent Waters
SRI
Monday, April 07, 2008
4:00 PM, 1221 CS
Data privacy is a ubiquitous concern. It is an issue that is
confronted by nearly every organization, from health care providers
and the payment card industry to web commerce sites. Protecting data
storage servers by securing the network perimeter is becoming
increasingly difficult given the number of attack vectors available
and trends toward distributed data storage. Consequently, several
enterprises are looking to realize access control by encryption.
Encrypting data reduces the problem of data privacy from protecting
all stored data to protecting small secret keys. While current
encryption systems provide a powerful security tool, there exist
fundamental limitations for realistic sharing of private data. In
particular, there is an inherent gap between how we want to share data
and our ability to express access policies in current encryption
systems.
In this talk I will present a new concept called "functional
encryption" that puts forth a new vision for how encryption systems
should work. In functional encryption, a data provider directly
expresses his data sharing policy during the encryption procedure
itself. Likewise, a recipient will be able to decrypt and access data
if and only if she possesses matching secret key credentials. By
allowing a provider to encrypt directly, and eliminating the need to
locate individual recipients, we can build much simpler systems. I
will describe the challenges in realizing functional encryption
systems as well as the techniques I have developed to overcome them.
In addition, I will discuss work in bringing these methods to
practice.
Bio:
Dr. Brent Waters received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton
University, spent one year as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford
University and is currently a Computer Scientist in the Principled
Systems group at SRI. His research interests focus on computer
security and cryptography. He has published over thirty papers on
security topics including the security of broadcast systems,
authentication, and functional encryption. Dr. Waters' original work
on identity-based encryption has been cited over 170 times and he is
generally regarded as a founder of the area of attribute-based
encryption and functional encryption.
Additional CS events.
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