CAREER: Cryptographic Proofs, Outside the Black-Box

密码学的发展已经远远超出了其最初的通信安全目标，今天，它允许我们以可证明安全的方式对数据进行计算。用户经常依赖不受信任的服务提供商来执行一系列服务，如统计分析和对外包的分布式私人数据的学习。在这些设置中，重要的是要确保安全性，防止任意行为和偏离协议规范的对手。加密证明构成了抵御此类攻击者的安全基石，并促进了许多强大的功能。这个项目解决了密码学证明理论的基本目标：我们能否有效地验证低效计算的结果？我们能写出隐藏所有秘密的陈述的证明吗？尽管进行了数十年的研究，但我们对这些问题的理解仍存在重大差距。现有的解决方案要么依赖于外部的信任来源，要么由于理想化模型中的启发式安全分析而指向我们理解中的未知数。这个项目通过改进我们对安全性的推理来克服这些问题。这涉及到研究新的推理技术，这些技术有意义地放宽了定义，并使用对手的代码来对抗系统。该项目还通过研讨会以及在密码学和安全基础方面培训研究生、本科生和K-12学生来建立一个研究社区。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Cryptography has advanced far beyond its original goal of securing communication and today, allows us to compute on data in provably secure ways. Users regularly depend on untrusted service providers to perform an array of services like statistical analysis and learning over outsourced, distributed private data. In these settings, it is important to ensure security against adversaries that behave arbitrarily and deviate from protocol specifications. Cryptographic proofs form the bedrock of security against such adversaries, and have facilitated a multitude of powerful capabilities. This project tackles fundamental goals in the theory of cryptographic proofs: Can we efficiently verify the results of inefficient computation? Can we write proofs of statements that hide all secrets about them? Despite decades of research, there are crucial gaps in our understanding of these problems. Existing solutions either rely on external sources of trust or point to unknowns in our understanding due to heuristic security analyses in idealized models. This project overcomes these issues by improving how we reason about security. This involves investigating new reasoning techniques that meaningfully relax definitions and use the code of an adversary against the system. The project also builds a research community through workshops as well as training graduate, undergraduate and K-12 students in the foundations of cryptography and security.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.