CAREER: Integrating Cryptography with Emerging Security Applications

虽然密码学研究在其历史上取得了长足的进步，为各种各样的问题提供了强有力的解决方案，但其实际应用却落后于人。只有一小部分加密设计已在实践中部署。此外，经常做出错误的选择，实施不安全的计划，导致代价高昂的后果。在许多应用计算机科学学科的研究中也可以看到类似的情况。越来越多的安全和隐私问题在传统学科中催生了许多新的面向安全的研究方向。然而，建议的自组织解决方案很少使用现代密码学研究的结果，并且具有适当的安全分析，仔细考虑后往往甚至是不安全的。在PI看来，强大的密码研究与其在工业和其他应用研究领域的低利用率之间存在差距的主要原因是：1)其他计算机科学领域的密码学家、实践者和研究人员是互不相连的社区，很少协作，并且通常不知道他人的最新发展；2)密码学家是完美主义者，因为他们定义和瞄准了非常强的安全概念，而许多应用程序更喜欢速度而不是这种完美的安全，因此选择了自组织协议；3)实践者往往因为缺乏密码学基础教育而做出错误的选择。拟议的研究和教育计划旨在缩小理论密码学研究与更多计算机科学应用领域之间的差距，通过进一步设计通用密码原语并将密码学与应用程序实际结合起来，以确保其应用的安全性。该方法包括以下步骤：1)与数据库系统和计算机体系结构等应用领域的教师和学生密切合作，严格研究需要密码解决方案的新兴应用；2)为现有定义太强的情况开发适当的安全定义，因为现有定义在给定应用的设置中无法实现或只能通过不够有效的方案来实现；3)为同时具有功能性、高效和可证明安全的新兴重要应用设计新协议，并改进现有公钥加密和签名方案的效率和可靠性，其相对低效往往是一个障碍；4)继续开展关于现代密码学各方面的外联活动和优质教育。

Alexandra BoldyrevaGeorgia Tech.0545659AbstractWhile cryptographic research has made great progress in its history, providing strong solutions to a wide variety of problems, its practical utilization lags behind. Only a small fraction of cryptographic designs have been deployed in practice. Moreover, wrong choices are often made and insecure schemes are implemented leading to costly consequences. A similar situation can be seen in research done in many applied computer science disciplines. Increased security and privacy concerns have given rise to many new security-oriented research directions within traditional disciplines. However, the proposed ad-hoc solutions rarely employ results of modern cryptographic research and have proper security analysis, and are often even insecure at closer consideration. In the PIs view the main reasons for a gap between strong cryptographic research and its poor utilization in industry and other applied research areas are: 1) cryptographers, practitioners and researchers in other computer science areas are disjoint communities that rarely collaborate and often are unaware of state-of-the-art developments of others; 2) cryptographers are perfectionists in that they define and target for very strong security notions while many applications prefer speed to such perfect security, and thus choose ad-hoc protocols; 3) practitioners often make the wrong choices because they lack basic education in cryptography.The proposed research and educational plan aim to narrow the gap between theoretical cryptographic research and more applied areas of computer science facing the need to secure their applications, by going further than designing general-purpose cryptographic primitives and actually integrating cryptography with the applications. The approach includes the following steps: 1) close collaboration with faculty and students from applied areas such as database systems and computer architecture to rigorously study the emerging applications requiring cryptographic solutions; 2) development of appropriate security definitions for the cases where the existing definitions are too strong in the sense they are unachievable in the setting of a given application or can be achieved only by insufficiently efficient schemes; 3) design of the new protocols for the applications of emerging importance that are simultaneously functional, efficient and provably secure, and improvement of efficiency and reliability of the existing public-key encryption and signature schemes whose relative inefficiency is often an obstacle; 4) continuing outreach activities and quality education on all aspects of modern cryptography.