Cryptography in the Post-Snowden Era

Suvradip Chakraborty
Friday | May 17, 2024 | 9 A.M.
Online

In this talk, we will focus on the constructions of cryptographic primitives in the setting of subversion attacks. In the setting of subversion, an adversary tampers with the machines of the honest parties thus leaking the honest parties’ secrets through the protocol transcript. Such attacks are quite realistic, since, for economical reasons, private companies and government agencies are often forced to use hardware that they did not produce themselves. Another source of such attacks are the insiders that originate from within a given company or organization. Last but not least, some attacks of this type can originate from the governments. The revelations of Edward Snowden disclosed a massive scale of the US government cyber attacks directed against the individuals (both within the US and abroad). The work of Mironov and Stephens-Davidowitz (EUROCRYPT’15) introduced the idea of reverse firewalls (RF) to protect against tampering of honest parties’ machines. This talk will focus particularly on the recent developments in the construction(s) of subversion-resilient  protocols in the setting of reverse firewalls. The talk is based on a series of joint works that appeared in CRYPTO’20, ASIACRYPT’21, EUROCRYPT’22, EUROCRYPT’23.

To join, write to <trustlab@cse.iitb.ac.in>

Speaker Biography

Suvradip Chakraborty is currently working as a Research Scientist in the Advanced Cryptography team at Visa Research. Prior to that he was a postdoc in the Foundations of Cryptography (FoC) group at ETH Zurich, hosted by Dennis Hofheinz. Even before that, he was a Postdoc at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), hosted by Krzysztof Pietrzak. He finished his PhD from IIT Madras supervised by Prof. C. Pandu Rangan. He works  on cryptography and security at large with a particular interest in the theory and applications of public-key cryptography.

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