Privacy Preserving Collaborations: DPFs to the rescue

Adithya Vadapalli
Thursday October 20, 2022, 5.00 PM
Online [Audience gathering: CSE Conference Room, Kanwal Rekhi Building]

This talk will describe a cryptographic primitive called Distributed Point Functions (DPFs). The primary focus will be on the relationship of DPFs with three fundamental cryptographic primitives; namely, private information retrieval (PIR), secure multi-party computation (secure MPC), and zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge (ZKP). The talk will constitute the presentation of two DPF-based secure systems, namely, a secure recommendations system and an anonymous messaging system establishing the relationship of DPFs with PIR, MPC and, ZKPs.

Speaker Biography

Adithya Vadapalli  is a Postdoc at University of Waterloo with Ian Goldberg. Prior to that, he completed his PhD from Indiana University, Bloomington in 2021 under the supervision of Ryan Henry. His PhD dissertation was on Distributed Point Functions and their applications to secure Multi-party computation. His primary research interests lie in Privacy Enhancing Technologies. He works on both coming up with cryptographic protocols and building secure systems.