CAREER: Computation and Collaboration in the Era of the Internet

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

Computation and Collaboration in the Era of the Internet The field of Cryptography has evolved far beyond its traditional goal of securing message transmission. Through the notion of a secure computation, a set of mutually distrustful agents can collaborate to accomplish a common goal while preserving each agent's privacy---examples include anonymous electronic elections, privacy-preserving electronic auctions or contract biddings, privacy-preserving datamining, fault-tolerant distributed computations and more. Protocols for secure computation have been extensively studied since the 80's, but key obstacles remain unresolved. In particular, the design of cryptographic protocols must prevent rogue interactions between executions of multiple protocols. Cryptographic protocols that are secure when executed in isolation, can be completely insecure when multiple (even two) such instances are executed concurrently, as is unavoidable on the Internet. New ideas and techniques recently developed (some by this PI) suggest that the intellectual tools are at hand for overcoming this problem. One of the principal goals of the PI?s research is to develop secure computation protocols that remain secure under concurrent executions---without assuming any trusted set-up assumptions. Another goal is to develop new techniques for both preventing and analyzing rogue interactions between protocols. Broader Significance: This research is expected to develop ideas and techniques which hold the potential to fundamentally change the way we collaborate towards common goals, and in particular to enable the development of protocols for securely collaborating on the Internet. In a connected world, rogue interactions between processes is a central problem; if successful this research will provide new tools and techniques for tackling this problem