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<div class="">This is an announcement of Alex Hoover's Dissertation Defense.<span class="" style="font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br class="">
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</span>Candidate: Alex Hoover<span class="" style="font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br class="">
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</span>Date: Monday, April 15, 2024<span class="" style="font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br class="">
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</span>Time: 10:30 am CT<span class="" style="font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br class="">
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</span><span class="">Remote Location</span>: <a href="https://axhoover.com/defense" class="">https://axhoover.com/defense</a><span class="" style="font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br class="">
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</span>Location: JCL 346<span class="" style="font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br class="">
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</span>Title: On the Limits of Efficiency and Privacy for Outsourced Computation<span class="" style="font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br class="">
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</span>Abstract: Private Information Retrieval (PIR) is a cryptographic primitive that allows a client to query for some element of a public database, held by a server, without revealing the element that the client is interested in. Recent developments in PIR
have used client-side preprocessing to speed up online query times. In this model, a client can run offline to compute a hint which it later uses to issue online queries. Unfortunately, all proposed solutions in this model before this work suffer from two
significant drawbacks: (1) updating an entry in the database requires some inefficient computation and (2) a client's query time is linear in their hint size.<span class="" style="font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br class="">
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</span>In this work, we overcome both of these obstacles by proposing Plinko, a new PIR scheme in the client-side preprocessing model. As part of our construction, we provide a new primitive called an invertible pseudorandom function, which allows someone with
the secret key to find the pre-image of some output efficiently. This primitive allows us to generically upgrade two previously proposed schemes to both: (1) update entries with nearly-constant time and communication and (2) avoid clients' linear pass through
their hints, improving the asymptotic runtime for clients with large storage.<span class="" style="font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br class="">
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</span>This talk focuses on the third and final chapter of my dissertation. However, I briefly discuss the how the other chapters in my dissertation contribute to the exploration of efficiency and privacy in outsourced computation.<span class="" style="font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br class="">
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</span>Advisors: David Cash<span class="" style="font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br class="">
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<div class="elementToProof">Committee Members: David Cash, Aloni Cohen, and Raul Castro Fernandez</div>
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