[Colloq] Title: Secure Surveys | Abhi Shelat, University of Virgina | 3/4/16 10-11am 366WVH

[Walker, Lashauna]

Title: Secure Surveys
Speaker: Abhi Shelat, University of Virginia
Date: 3/4/16  | Time: 10-11am  | Location: 366 WVH

Talk Title: Secure surveys

Abstract:  Recently, even the most sophisticated IT organizations, governments, and security firms have been breached, their data has been stolen, and in some cases, publicly disclosed. Many ongoing efforts seek to develop more robust systems that guard against breach; in this talk, we discuss a different way to mitigate breach:  build systems that achieve the same functionality, but do not need to collect or store confidential data.

As a case study, we consider the problem of running a secure survey.  Most survey systems either sacrifice the anonymity of the participants or the soundness of the survey by allowing malicious respondents to spam the system.  We present a secure survey system in which a survey agent can independently (without any interaction) select an ad-hoc group of registered users based only on their identities (e.g., their email addresses), and create a survey where only those users can anonymously submit exactly one response.  The case study highlights important steps of our process: we first present an abstract provably-secure implementation of surveys based on standard cryptographic building blocks; we then present a practical instantiation of our abstract protocol, called ANONIZE, which is provably-secure in the random oracle model based on cryptographic assumptions about groups with bilinear maps.  Finally, we report on using ANONIZE in real world settings to conduct semester-end course evaluations.
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Based on works with Susan Hohenberger, Steve Myers, and Rafael Pass.

Bio: Abhi Shelat is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Virginia. His research areas include cryptography, secure computation protocols, and encryption schemes. He is recipient of the NSF Career Award, Google Faculty Award, SAIC Research Award, Virgina FEST Fellowship, Jacobs Future of Money Research grant and named a Microsoft Faculty Fellow. He earned his PhD from MIT and an A.B. from Harvard.




Thank You.

LaShauna Walker
Events and Administrative Specialist
College of Computer and Information Science
Northeastern University
617-373-2763
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