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

CT-ISG：下一代安全应用的密码基础Boaz Barak这个项目解决了网络社会和普及数据库给密码学带来的一些基本挑战。具体地说，它研究了密码协议的存在，这些协议允许相互不信任的各方以最小的隐私牺牲实现共同的目标。这些协议中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，这种相互作用可能会导致细微但致命的安全缺陷，因此构造对于这种相互作用具有健壮性的协议是密码学中的一个中心问题。该项目采用了新的思想和技术来解决这一问题，更具体地说，研究了信任和交互之间的权衡，假设存在完全可信的第三方，已知的协议具有健壮的安全性。这个项目的重点是减少信任方的假设，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。我们的目标是获得两个积极的结果--协议在比之前所知的更弱的信任假设下获得强大的安全性，以及消极结果--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。这将使安全应用程序的用户知道在信任和安全方面什么是可以实现的，什么是不可以实现的。本项目还解决了当前鲁棒安全协议构建中效率低下的主要来源，以找出目前此类构建中的效率瓶颈在多大程度上是固有的。

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.