Marina Blanton - A Bigger Picture of Secure Multi-Party Computation [19 Oct 2023]

This talk is part of the CrySP Speaker Series on Privacy. For more information and to view other talks in the series, go to: https://crysp.uwaterloo.ca/speakers/

Bigger Picture of Secure Multi-Party Computation

Marina Blanton, University at Buffalo

October 19, 2023

Abstract:
Secure multi-party computation is a mature sub-area of cryptography that
enables computation over private data. Products utilizing such
techniques are now increasingly being built by tech companies for
privacy-preserving data analytics and other purposes. For many years,
progress in this area has focused on mechanisms for securely performing
different operations, i.e., on how to perform secure function
evaluation. In this talk, we argue that other aspects of
privacy-preserving computation deserve the attention of the research
community. They include ensuring the trustworthiness of inputs to the
computation, achieving security of linked computations, and selecting
functions to ensure that the (authorized) information disclosure from
the output is limited. We investigate the last component in more detail
on the example of average salary computation, inspired by the Boston
privacy-preserving gender gap study carried out in 2015-2017.

Bio:
Marina Blanton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer
Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo (UB). She also
serves as the Faculty Director of Women in Science and Engineering
(WiSE) program at UB. Dr. Blanton received her MS in EECS from Ohio
University in 2002, MS in CS from Purdue University in 2004, and PhD in
CS from Purdue University in 2007. Her research interests are centrally
in information security, privacy, and applied cryptography and recent
projects span areas such as secure computation and outsourcing,
integrity of outsourced computation and storage, and private biometric
and genomic computation. Dr. Blanton has over 80 refereed publications,
has served on the technical program committees of top conferences such
as USENIX Security, IEEE S&P, and CCS, and is currently an associate
editor of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing. She has
received multiple awards for her research, including a 2013 AFOSR Young
Investigator Award, the 2015 ACM CCS Test of Time Award, and a 2018
Google Faculty Research Award.