GHC14 Day 1 - keynotes

I enjoyed the first keynote of the GHC this year.  Shafi Goldwasser is a leader in encryption research at MIT.  Many attendees found the presentation too technical to the point where "over my head" was a common social media post.  As a InfoSec professional (in the administration side, not the theoretical or mathematical side), I enjoyed the talk.  She used cartoonish pictures instead of bullets (thank you!) and described the ideas with general analogies.  The slides also included with the pictures, some equations and references to research for those that want to dig in further.

The work centers around how to work with private data without exposing all the data. For example, how do we get data for medical research - such as the number of cases where both X and Y are found - from a number of hospitals without getting all the patient records?  How can we store data in the cloud encrypted, and query it without giving away the keys to the whole data set?  How can we prove a theory without showing the proof?

The work includes HElib to do computation on encrypted data and Functional Encryption for fuzzy identity based encryption (Sakai,Waters - 2005).

Fun stuff.

-SML