[Colloquium] Distinguished Lecture: Srini Devadas Tue 10/15 1:30

[Laszlo Babai]

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 DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
 UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
 
                      DISTINGUISHED LECTURE

  http://theorycenter.cs.uchicago.edu/distinguished-lecture-series

Date:      Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Time:      1:30 p.m.
Place:     Ryerson 251,  1100 E 58th Street

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Speaker:   Srinivas Devadas
From:      MIT
URL:       http://people.csail.mit.edu/devadas

Title:     Let's Stop Trusting Software With Our Sensitive Data

Abstract:
 
Nary a day goes by without hearing about break-ins into software
systems, with personal or confidential data being compromised. Yet,
as time goes on, we are trusting the cloud more and more to perform
sensitive operations for us. Demanding more trust in software
systems is a recipe for disaster.

Hardware to the rescue! Suppose we only trust hardware
manufacturers and cryptographers, and not system software
developers, application programmers, or other software vendors. It
will be the hardware manufacturer's job to produce a piece of
hardware that provides some security properties.  The additional
physical security that comes with hardware is a bonus; however,
there is still a leap of faith! We must trust that the hardware's
security guarantees really do take software out of the loop.

This poses a challenging problem. Software that operates on our
data is assumed to be curious or malicious. To make matters worse,
the cloud service provider can also be malicious and can run
whatever program it wants on our data.  How can we ensure privacy
of data despite the practically infinite number of malicious
programs out there?

We describe the architecture of the Ascend (Architecture for Secure
Computation on Encrypted Data) processor that achieves these goals
while running batch or stream computations that operate on
encrypted client data and return encrypted results to the client;
the only entity that the client has to trust is the processor
itself. Ascend ensures privacy even though the adversary has
control over what software runs on Ascend, and can monitor all
external pin traffic.

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Biography:

Srini Devadas is the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), where he has been on the faculty since 1988.  He
served as the Associate Head of EECS with responsibility for
Computer Science from 2005-2011.  Devadas has worked in the areas
of Computer-Aided Design, testing, formal verification, compilers
for embedded processors, computer architecture, computer security,
and computational biology and has co-authored numerous papers in
these areas and received several best paper awards.  Devadas was
elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 1999.

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Host: Hank Hoffmann

*Refreshments will be served after the talk at 2:30 in Ryerson 255*

Persons who need assistance should call 773-702-6614