From Mental Poker to Core Business: Why and How to Deploy Secure Computation Protocols?

Speaker:

Dr. Moti Yung
Snap Inc & Columbia University

Abstract:

Technological innovations in security and privacy are critical to advancing modern computing in our time. I will present the initial steps of an ongoing effort involving deployment of experimental commercial applications designed and built as a 'secure multi-party computation protocol for specific tasks,' to be used repetitively to achieve a number of concrete ubiquitous business goals. In these applications, the outputs are calculated in the presence of privacy constraints which prevent parties from sharing their individual inputs directly and openly. I will also discuss what I think are the reasons for the inherent difficulty of developing such routines in general (for achieving business goals). In particular, I will survey what I believe to be the reasons that 40 years since the notion of secure computation was invented as a basic theoretical idea, capturing specific and then general computational tasks, and in spite of its theoretical and even recent experimentation success, the notion has not yet been widely and seriously used in achieving routine relevant business goals (in contrast with symmetric key and public key cryptosystems and protocols). The presentation will also cover the general bottom up methodology used in this concrete industrial effort leading to the design and development process.

Bio:

Moti Yung is a computer scientist whose main interests are in cryptography, security, and privacy. He is currently with Snap Inc, and has been holding adjunct faculty appointments at Columbia  University where he has co-advised several Ph.D. students over the years. He is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, IACR, and EATCS. He was with IBM, CertCo, RSA Lab, and Google. Dr. Yung made extensive contributions on the foundation of modern cryptography as well as  innovative secure industrial technology within actual large scale systems, including the Greek National Lottery system, the security and privacy aspects of Google's global systems such as the Ad Exchange (ADX) and the ephemeral ID efforts for Google’s BLE beacons, and Snap’s "my eyes only memories" cloud security. Also, his invention of Cryptovirology predicted ransomware and algorithm substitution on crypto systems and standards such as the Dual_EC_DRNG subversion.