A bunch of us hapless cryptographers got the following boilerplate comment from the FOCS'15 PC: "Overall, submissions related to multi-linear maps and indistinguishability obfuscation were held to a somewhat higher standard. The PC expressed some concern with the recent flurry of activities pertaining to multi-linear maps and indistinguishability obfuscation, given how little we understand and … Continue reading Indistinguishability Obfuscation and Multi-linear Maps: A Brave New World – Guest Post by Ran Canetti

The cryptography semester at the Simons Institute is well on its way. Last week we had a fascinating workshop on securing computation: thanks to Hugo Krawczyk and Amit Sahai for organizing. You can find the program and video links here (covering, among many other topics, everything you always wanted to know about obfuscation but were afraid … Continue reading Historical Papers in Cryptography: Umesh Vazirani on Quantum and Post-Quantum Cryptography

The cryptography program at Simons is well under way and we're wrapping up our second week here at the wonderful Simons Institute at Berkeley. It's been a roller-coaster ride discussing the thrilling developments in the field: from fully homomorphic encryption to multilinear maps, obfuscation, differential privacy and more. The orientation/bootcamp week was an unqualified success: survey … Continue reading Cryptography Program@Simons: Historical Papers

The Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley invites applications for Research Fellowships for the research program on Cryptography that will take place in Summer, 2015. These Fellowships are open to outstanding junior scientists (at most 6 years from PhD by 1 May, 2015). Further details and application instructions can be found … Continue reading Simons-Ber​keley Research Fellowship​s in Cryptograp​hy for Summer 2015

(joint post by Yael Kalai and Guy Rothblum) It feels especially appropriate to write about recent developments in cryptography and code obfuscation while basking in the afterglow of a wonderful workshop at the Weizmann Institute of Science, celebrating the work of Shafi Goldwasser and Sivio Micali---this year’s Turing Award recipients. Shafi and Silvio repeatedly demonstrated … Continue reading Progress and Challenges in Code Obfuscation (part I/II)

This post will be about differential privacy (DP), with a focus on what is often referred to in the differential privacy literature (often colloquially) as "privacy loss". A brief recap of the setting: a trusted data curator has a database of sensitive information about individuals. The curator wants to release aggregate statistical information about the … Continue reading Privacy Loss as a Random Variable

In this post I wanted to share some background and thoughts about leakage-resilient cryptography, which has recently been the focus of a rich body of research. Before saying anything more, I do want to emphasize that this is not meant to be a survey – just a collection of thoughts and observations about recent work … Continue reading On Leakage-Resilient Cryptography

Is it “safe” to release aggregate statistics from a database of sensitive information on individuals? Evidence suggests that even seemingly innocuous statistical releases can fatally compromise an individual’s privacy, especially in the presence of auxiliary information about the individual (see this paper by Homer et al. for a recent example). How might we then get … Continue reading Privacy-Preserving Data Analysis and Computational Learning: A Match made in Heaven