[Colloq] PhD Proposal Announcement - Travis Mayberry - Practical Oblivious RAM and its Applications - 9/11, 2pm, 366 WVH

[Jessica Biron]

Travis Mayberry 
Date: 9/11 
Time: 2:00 PM 
Location: WVH 366 


Title: Practical Oblivious RAM and its Applications 


Abstract: Oblivious RAM is a powerful cryptographic primitive that allows a user's access pattern to an unsecure database to be hidden from the owner of that database. Techniques for ORAM have been around for almost 20 years, but interest has recently peaked with the widespread use of cloud storage. ORAM has emerged as a solution providing the highest level of security for outsourced data: not only is the data itself encrypted, but the user's access pattern to that data is hidden from the server. There has, consequently, been a flurry of research into making ORAM more and more efficient, but there are many hurdles that need to be passed in order to make it truely practical for real-world use. I propose investigate combining ORAM with a related primitive called PIR in order to improve efficiency and real-world performance. In addition, I would like to investigate the potential uses for an efficient ORAM and work to overcome some previously unnoticed weaknesses in existing schemes, such as the inability to resize databases and the relatively high data latency imposed on users. 



Committee: 
Dr. Agnes Chan 
Dr. Erik-Oliver Blass 
Dr. Daniel Wichs 
Dr. Seny Kamara 
Dr. Gene Tsudik 


Website: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/travism/code/proposal.html