CT-ISG: Cryptographic Foundations for Next-Generation Security Applications

CT-ISG：下一代安全应用的加密基础这个项目解决了网络社会和普适数据库对密码学带来的一些基本挑战。具体来说，它研究了加密协议的存在性，这些协议允许互不信任的各方以最小的隐私牺牲来实现共同目标。这包括电子选举、电子拍卖、隐私保护数据挖掘和许多其他应用的特殊情况协议。这类协议的一个中心问题是在网络上执行一个或多个协议的多个实例对安全性的影响。众所周知，在某些情况下，这种交互可能会导致微妙但致命的安全缺陷，因此构建相对于这种交互具有健壮安全性的协议是这种密码学中的一个核心问题。这个项目使用了最新的想法和技术来解决这个问题。更具体地说，这项研究涉及研究信任和互动之间的权衡。假设存在完全可信的第三方，则存在具有健壮安全性的已知协议。该项目侧重于减少对可信方的假设，并旨在发现在不损害安全性的情况下可以在多大程度上做到这一点。我们的目标是得到积极的结果——协议在比以前已知的更弱的信任假设下获得健壮的安全性，以及消极的结果——表明如果没有一些信任假设，某些安全目标是不可能实现的。这将允许安全应用程序的用户知道在信任和安全方面什么是可实现的，什么是不可实现的。本项目还解决了当前健壮安全协议结构中效率低下的主要原因，以便找出此类结构中当前效率瓶颈的固有程度。

CT-ISG: Cryptographic Foundations for Next-Generation SecurityApplicationsBoaz BarakThis project tackles some of the foundational challenges to theadvent of the networked society and pervasive databases pose tocryptography. Specifically, it studies the existence ofcryptographic protocols that allow mutually distrusting parties toachieve a common goal with a minimal sacrifice in privacy. Thisincludes as a special case protocols for electronic elections, electronicauctions, privacy-preserving data mining and many more applications.A central issue in such protocols is the effect on security of executingmultiples instances of one or several protocols over a network.It is known that in some cases such interaction can lead to subtlebut fatal security flaws, and so constructing protocols whose securityis robust with respect to such interactionsis a central question in this cryptography. This project usesrecent and new ideas and techniques to attack this problem.More concretely, the research involvesstudying the tradeoff between trust and interaction.There are known protocols with robust security assuming the existenceof completely trusted third parties. This project focuses on reducing theassumption of a trusted party, and aims to discover to what extentthis can be done without compromising security. The goal is to get bothpositive results- protocols obtaining robust security under weaker trustassumptions than was previously known, and negative results- showingthat certain security goals are impossible to achieve without sometrust assumptions. This will allow the users of secure applicationsto know what is and is not achievable in terms of trust and security.This project also tackles the main sources of inefficiency in currentconstructions of robustly secure protocol, in order to find out to what extentthe current efficiency bottlenecks in such constructions are inherent.