Dr. Lily Chen

Dr. Lily (Lidong) Chen is a mathematician and the manager of Cryptographic Technology Group in NIST’s Computer Security Division. She received her PhD from Aarhus University, Denmark. Her areas of research include cryptographic protocols, zero-knowledge proof, special featured digital signature schemes, network security, and security for wireless and mobility. Besides cryptographic research and applications. Dr. Chen has actively contributed to cryptographic and security standards development by IEEE-SA, ISO, and other consensus and consortium standards organizations. The book “Communication System Security” she co-authored and published in 2012 by CRC Press has been used as textbook by many universities. She has led NIST Cryptographic Program since 2012. 

Title - Information Security in Quantum Time

Abstract - This presentation addresses quantum challenges to information security. It introduces NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Standardization project and discusses transition and migration strategies in deploying post-quantum cryptography in the existing applications. The presentation highlights some research areas which are critical for PQC standardization.

     Prof. Miran Kim

Miran Kim is an assistant professor of School of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Texas, Health Science Center at Houston. I received my Ph.D degree in mathematical sciences at Seoul National University, Korea, in 2017 (advised by Prof. Jung Hee Cheon). I was a post-doctoral researcher at the Division of Biomedical Informatics of University of California San Diego (hosted by Prof. Xiaoqian Jiang).
My research focuses on the design of novel strategies to enable secure and privacy-preserving data analysis using homomorphic encryption. I have an extensive experience in implementation of efficient protocols for data query processing, genomic computation, and machine learning.

Title - Practical Applications of Homomorphic Encryption

Abstract - Homomorphic encryption is an encryption method to allow arbitrary computation on encrypted data without decryption. It has emerged as one of the promising solutions to address privacy and security issues in outsourcing computation on sensitive data. We will introduce recent development and progress on homomorphic encryption. Further we summarize the state-of-art benchmarks of the encryption systems in real-world applications such as machine learning and genome-wide association study.

     Prof. Ron Steinfeld

Ron Steinfeld received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 2003 from Monash University, Australia. Since 2015, he is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia. Following his Ph.D. Ron worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in cryptography and information security at Macquarie University, Australia, holding the positions of Macquarie University Research Fellow in cryptography and information security (2007-2009), and ARC Australian Research Fellow in cryptography and information security (2009- 2012). Ron completed his ARC Research Fellowship at Monash University (2012-2014). His main research interests are in the design and analysis of cryptographic algorithms and protocols, in particular in the areas of lattice-based cryptography and secure computation protocols. He has over 18 years of research experience in cryptography and information security. He has published more than 60 research papers in international refereed conferences and journals, more than 10 of which have each been cited over 100 times. He received the ASIACRYPT 2015 best paper award. He has served on the technical Program Committee of numerous international conferences in cryptography, is an editorial board member of the journal `Designs Codes and Cryptography’, and consults in cryptography design for the software industry.

Title - Lattice-Based Zero-Knowledge Proofs: Shorter and Faster Constructions and Applications

Abstract - We devise new techniques for design and analysis of efficient lattice-based zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP). First, we introduce one-shot proof techniques for non-linear polynomial relations of degree k ≥ 2, where the protocol achieves a negligible soundness error in a single execution, and thus performs significantly better in both computation and communication compared to prior protocols requiring multiple repetitions. Such proofs with degree k ≥ 2 have been crucial ingredients for important privacy-preserving protocols in the discrete logarithm setting. Moreover, we introduce two speedup techniques for lattice-based ZKPs: a CRT-packing technique supporting “inter-slot” operations, and “NTT friendly” tools that permit the use of fully-splitting rings. The former technique comes at almost no cost to the proof length, and the latter one barely increases it, which can be compensated for by tweaking the rejection sampling parameters while still having faster computation overall. To illustrate the utility of our techniques, we show how to use them to build efficient relaxed proofs for important relations, namely proof of commitment to bits, one-out-of-many proof, range proof and set membership proof. Despite their relaxed nature, we further show how our proof systems can be used as building blocks for advanced cryptographic tools such as ring signatures. Our ring signature achieves a dramatic improvement in length over all the previous proposals from lattices at the same security level.

     Prof. Huaxiong Wang

Huaxiong Wang received a PhD in Mathematics from University of Haifa, Israel in 1996 and a PhD in Computer Science from University of Wollongong, Australia in 2001. He has been with Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore since 2006, where he also served as the Head of Division of Mathematical Sciences from 2013 to 2015. He is currently the Deputy Director of Strategic Centre for Research in Privacy-Preserving Technologies & Systems (SCRIPTS) at NTU.  He has more than 20 year experience of research in cryptography and information security. He is author/co-author of 1 book, 9 edited books and over 200 papers in international journals and conferences, covering various areas in cryptography and information security. He has supervised over 25 PhD students, and has served on the editorial board of several international journals and as a member/chair of the program committee for more than 100 international conferences. He received the inaugural Award of Best Research Contribution awarded by the Computer Science Association of Australasia in 2004. He was awarded the Minjiang Scholar in 2013 by Fujian Province, China. He was the invited speaker of ASIACRYPT 2017, and he will serve as the program Co-Chair of Asiacrypt 2020 and 2021.

Title - Secure and Verifiable Computation

Abstract - Outsourcing computation has gained significant popularity in recent years due to the prevalence of cloud computing.  How to keep the confidentiality of the client's data and how to ensure the correctness of the server's computation ate two fundamental problems to achieve. Verifiable computation, introduced by Gennaro, Gentry and Parno in 2010, allows to delegate the computation of a function f on outsourced data x to third parties, such that the data owner and/or other third parties can verify that the outcome y = f(x) has been computed correctly by the third party. Constructing efficient verifiable computation schemes has attracted a lot of attention during the past decade. In this talk, we will present a brief overview of the state-of-the-art and discuss a new (multi-server) model for verifiable computation, which allows unconditional security, practical efficiency, and public delegation.