Marina Blanton, General-Purpose Secure Computation and Outsourcing

The desire to compute on sensitive data without revealing it has led to several decades of research in the area of secure multi-party computation. Today, cloud computing serves as a major motivation for the development of secure data processing techniques suitable for use in outsourced environments for computing with private or sensitive data. Despite much attention, most of the available techniques focused on a rather narrow domain of integer arithmetic. In this talk, we describe our work on other types of computation and algorithms suitable for secure computation and outsourcing with the goal of enabling secure and efficient distributed implementation of a general-purpose program. This, in particular, includes a compiler that transforms a program written in C extension, where variables to be protected are marked as private, into its secure distributed implementation suitable for execution in the cloud. About the speaker: Marina Blanton is an assistant professor in the Department of ComputerScience and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. She received her MS in EECS from Ohio University in 2002, MS in CS from Purdue University in2004, and PhD in CS from Purdue University in 2007. Dr. Blanton's researchinterests are centrally in information security, privacy, and appliedcryptography. Recent projects span across areas such as secure computationand outsourcing, integrity of outsourced computation and storage, privatebiometric and genomic computation, privacy-preserving systems for medicaland social networks, authentication, anonymity, and key management. Dr.Blanton has served on technical program committees for top conferences andworkshops and journal editorial boards. Her research is supported by NSF,AFOSR, and AFRL.