[Colloquium] TTI-C Talk Luis von Ahn, November 7th @ 1:00pm

[Katherine Cumming]

TOYOTA TECHNOLOGICAL INSTITUTE TALK
 
Speaker:  Luis von Ahn, Carnegie Mellon University
Speaker's homepage:  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/
 
Time:  Monday, November 7th, 1:00pm
Location:  TTI-C Conference Room 
 
Title: Covert Two-Party Computation
 
Abstract:
 
This talk requires no specific or detailed knowledge of anything.  You will
only need to know the following:
 
Who is Britney Spears 
Who is George Bush?
What is a terrorist cell? 
What is a Circuit?
What is a Function? 
 
The talk is about solving important everyday problems such as telling
somebody you have a crush on them or cheating in card games. 
Long and Detailed Abstract: 
 
We introduce covert two-party computation, a stronger notion of security
than standard secure two-party computation. Like standard secure two-party
computation, covert two-party computation allows Alice and Bob, with secret
inputs $x_A$ and $x_B$ respectively, to compute a function $f(x_A,x_B)$
without leaking any additional information about their inputs. In addition,
covert two-party computation guarantees that even the existence of a
computation is hidden from all protocol participants unless the value of the
function mandates otherwise. This allows the construction of protocols that
return $f(x_A,x_B)$ only when it equals a certain value of interest (such as
"Yes, we are romantically interested in each other") but for which neither
party can determine whether the other even ran the protocol whenever
$f(x_A,x_B)$ is not a value of interest.
 
Since existing techniques for secure function evaluation always reveal that
both parties participate in the computation, covert computation requires the
introduction of new techniques based on provably secure steganography. We
introduce security definitions for covert two-party computation and show
that this surprising notion can be achieved by a protocol given the
Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption.
 
This material is joint work with Nick Hopper and John Langford and appeared
in STOC 2005. 
 
 
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If you have questions, or would like to meet the speaker, please contact
Katherine at 773-834-1994 or kcumming at tti-c.org.   For information on future
TTI-C talks and events, please go to the TTI-C Events page:
http://www.tti-c.org/events.html.  TTI-C (1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL
60637)
 
 
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