BU Sec Seminar: Function Secret Sharing for PSI-CA: With Applications to Private Contact Tracing

  • Starts: 1:00 pm on Wednesday, March 10, 2021
  • Ends: 2:00 pm on Wednesday, March 10, 2021
Speaker: Steve Lu, CEO, Stealth Software Technologies Abstract: We present a new privacy-preserving framework for proximity/risk aware contact tracing based on new cryptographic constructions. In this work, we describe a token-based solution to contact tracing via Distributed Point Functions (DPF) and, more generally, Function Secret Sharing (FSS). The key idea behind the solution is that FSS natively supports secure keyword/token search on raw sets of keywords without a need for processing the keyword sets via a data structure for set membership. Furthermore, the FSS functionality features a linear homomorphic property which enables aggregating up numerical payloads associated with multiple matches without additional interaction between phones and servers. Combined with new models to represent proximity/risk as these numerically aggregated values and a secure process from phone-to-server, these features combined make an attractive tool for lightweight privacy-preserving searching on a database of tokens belonging to infected individuals. Speaker Bio: Dr. Steve Lu is the CEO of Stealth Software Technologies, Inc. Dr. Lu has served as the Principal Investigator on several projects involving secure computation and taking theory to practice. He received his PhD in Mathematics from UCLA under Rafail Ostrovsky in 2009. Within Stealth, Dr. Lu continues to lead ongoing research, design, and implementation of cryptographic tools and libraries. His theoretical contributions include foundational work in Garbled RAM and Distributed Oblivious RAM, and has published over a dozen papers in leading crypto and security venues.
Location:
The Zoom link is sent out to the BUsec mailing list. To join the mailing list, please email Ari Karchmer at arika@bu.edu