Title:
Editing the Immutable Blockchain
Presenter Name:Giuseppe Ateniese
URL:https://web.stevens.edu/facultyprofile/?id=2182/
Abstract:
A new disruptive approach will be introduced that makes the Blockchain viable for enterprise use
by addressing privacy and scalability issues. The new Blockchain remains decentralized and immutable but
a "plan b" is supported if things go wrong. This technology has been co-developed with Accenture and its
announcement made international news and appeared in several news outlets (NYT, FT, Forbes, Reuters,
Fortune, MIT Tech Review, TechRepublic, etc.).
This talk is about FinTech, Security, and Privacy.
Short Bio:
Giuseppe Ateniese is the David and GG Farber Endowed Chair in Computer Science and department chair at Stevens Institute of Technology. He was with Sapienza-University of Rome (Italy) and Assistant/Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University (USA), and one of the founders of the JHU Information Security Institute. He was a researcher at IBM Zurich Research lab (Switzerland) and scientist at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California (USA). He also briefly worked as visiting professor at Microsoft in Redmond (USA). He received the NSF CAREER Award for his research in privacy and security, and the Google Faculty Research Award and the IBM Faculty Award for his research on cloud security.
Title:
Computations on Encrypted Data and Privacy
Presenter Name:David Pointcheval
URL:
http://www.di.ens.fr/~pointche/index.php
Abstract:
Functional encryption is a nice tool that bridges the gap between usability
and privacy when providing access to huge databases: while being encrypted,
aggregated information is available with a fine-tuned control by the owner
of the database who can specify the functions he allows users to compute on
the data.
Unfortunately, giving access to several functions might leak too much
information on the database, since once the decryption capability is given
for a specific function, this is for an unlimited number of ciphertexts. In
addition, this is difficult to control the functional decryption keys that
are distributed, and collusions should be considered.
In the particular case of the inner-product, if too many functional keys
are known by the adversary, he can completely learn the plaintexts.
On the other hand, the major applications that make use of inner-products,
such as machine-learning, need to compute many of them.
We will thus discuss on functional encryption and some approaches to
mitigate attacks.
Short Bio:
David Pointcheval obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Caen in 1996.
Since 1998, he has been a CNRS researcher, in the Computer Science Department at Ecole normale supérieure, Paris, France, in the Cryptography Team, that he has been leading since 2005. This team has also been associated to Inria since 2008.
Since 2017, he has been the chair of the Computer Science Department at ENS.His research focuses on provable security of cryptographic primitives and protocols.He is an author of more than 130 international conference and journal papers, and an inventor of a dozen of patents.He has been one of the nine elected directors in the board of IACR, for 9 years.He has been program chair for several international conferences in cryptography, including PKC 2010 and Eurocrypt 2012.He has recently been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant, from the European Commission, on the Privacy for the Cloud.
Title: Adversarial signal processing: a game-theoretic framework
Presenter Name:Mauro Barni
URL:
http://clem.dii.unisi.it/~vipp/index.php/people/17-professors/126-mbarni
Abstract:
Security-oriented applications of signal processing are receiving increasing attention. Digital watermarking, steganography, multimedia forensics, biometrics, intrusion detection, network monitoring, are just a few. In all these cases, the presence of one or more adversaries aiming at making the system fail can not be neglected. For each of the above fields, several attacks and counter-attacks have been developed, often following a typical cat & mouse loop wherein attacks and countermeasures are iteratively developed each time focusing on the latest developed solutions. A problem with such an approach is that it fails to provide a unifying view of the challenges that the application of signal processing tools in an adversarial setting poses. Even worse, the security of the proposed solutions is hardly provable due to the lack of rigorous security models suited to capture the peculiarities of the addressed scenarios. Times are ripe to go beyond this limited view and lay the basis for a general theory of adversarial signal processing, i.e., a theory that takes into account the impact that the presence of an adversary has on the design of effective signal processing tools. It is the aim of this talk to: i) motivate the need for the development of a general theory of adversarial signal processing; ii) propose a unifying framework based on game-theory; iii) present some recent results regarding adversarial hypothesis testing.
Short Bio:
Mauro Barni graduated in electronic engineering at the University of Florence in 1991. He received the PhD in informatics and telecommunications in October 1995. He has carried out his research activity for over 25 years first at the Department of Electronics and Telecommunication of the University of Florence, then at the Department of Information Engineering and Mathematics of the University of Siena. During the last two decades he has been studying the application of image processing techniques to copyright protection and authentication of multimedia, and the possibility of processing signals that have been previously encrypted without decrypting them. Lately he has been working on theoretical and practical aspects of adversarial signal processing.
He is author/co-author of about 300 papers published in international journals and conference proceedings, and holds five patents in the field of digital watermarking and image authentication. He is co-author of the book "Watermarking Systems Engineering: Enabling Digital Assets Security and other Applications", published by Dekker Inc. in February 2004.
He participated to several National and European research projects on diverse topics, including computer vision, multimedia signal processing, remote sensing, digital watermarking, IPR protection.
He is the Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security for the years 2015-2017. He was the funding editor of the EURASIP Journal on Information Security. He has been serving as associate editor of many journals including several IEEE Transactions. Prof. Barni has been the chairman of the IEEE Information Forensic and Security Technical Committee (IFS-TC) from 2010 to 2011. He was the technical program chair of ICASSP 2014. He was appointed DL of the IEEE SPS for the years 2013-2014. He is the recipient of the Individual Technical Achievement Award of EURASIP EURASIP for 2016. He is a fellow member of the IEEE and a member of EURASIP.
 
Presenter Name:Willy Susilo
URL:
http://www.uow.edu.au/~wsusilo/index.html
Short Bio:
Willy Susilo is a Professor and the Head of School of Computing and Information Technology and the director of Institute of Cybersecurity and Cryptology (iC2) at the University of Wollongong. He was previously awarded the prestigious ARC Future Fellow by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the Researcher of the Year award in 2016 by the University of Wollongong. His main research interests include cybersecurity, cryptography and information security. His work has been cited more than 9,000 times in Google Scholar. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Information journal. He has served as a program committee member in dozens of international conferences. He is currently serving as an Associate Editors in several international journals, including Elsevier Computer Standards and Interface and International Journal of Information Security (IJIS, Springer). He has published more than 300 research papers in the area of cybersecurity and cryptology. He is a senior member of IEEE.
Title:(Linkable) Ring Signature and its Applications to Blockchain
Presenter Name:Joseph Liu
URL:
http://users.monash.edu.au/~kailiu/
Abstract:
Ring signature is a kind of anonymous signature. Verifier only knows that the signer is a user within a group, yet does not know the identity of this signer. In this talk, we will cover the basics of ring signature and linkable ring signature, including the concept, applications, technical constructions and variants. We will further relate linkable ring signature to Monero, one of the current largest blockchain-based cryptocurrency in the world, which is considered to be the most commercial deployment of linkable ring signature nowadays. Finally, we will discuss ways to improve the RingCT (Ring Confidential Transactions) of Monero, the linkable ring signature based protocol to provide privacy for Monero users.
Short Bio:
Dr. Joseph Liu is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University. He got his PhD from the Chinese University of Hong Kong at 2004. Prior to joining Monash at 2015, he has worked as a research scientist at Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) in Singapore for more than 7 years. His research areas include cyber security, blockchain, applied cryptography and privacy enhanced technology. He has served as the program chair for various security conferences, including ProvSec, ACISP, ISPEC and the associated editor for several journals such as Computer Journal. He has published more than 130 papers in top conferences and journals and received the Best Paper Award from ESORICS 2014, ESORICS 2015 and Best Student Paper Award for his joint-paper with his PhD student in ACISP 2017. His papers receive more than 3500 citations and his H-index is 35. His remarkable research in linkable ring signature forms the theory basis of Monero (XMR), one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world.
Title:Accountable Anonymous Authentications
Presenter Name:Man Ho (Allen) Au
 
URL:
http://www4.comp.polyu.edu.hk/~csallen/
Abstract:
Anonymous authentication schemes is an important tool for privacy protection. It allows users to disclose only the necessary information, such as group membership. In the digital age, it is a useful tool to protect user privacy since individuals' lifestyles, habits, whereabouts, and associations can be inferred from their online transactions. Unfortunately, anonymity is a double-edged sword that can be abused. Some users may misbehave under the cover of anonymity, e.g., by defacing webpages on Wikipedia or posting vulgar comments on YouTube. Balancing anonymity and accountability has always been a challenging research problem.
Anonymous credentials are the cryptographic schemes designed to address this challenge. Using anonymous credentials, a user can anonymously prove their possession of valid credentials without revealing additional information. In this talk, we discuss how existing anonymous authentication techniques from the cryptographic community provide various balance among security, anonymity and accountability. We also present some of our recent results.
Short Bio:
Dr. Allen Au is an assistant professor at the Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He received his PhD from the University of Wollongong in 2009. Dr. Au's research interests include information security, applied cryptography, accountable anonymity and blockchain. He has published over 100 refereed papers in top conferences, including the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) and the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). His work has been cited over 2500 times, with an h-index of 26. He received the 2009 PET runner-up award for outstanding research in privacy enhancing technologies and the best paper award at ACISP 2016. He is now serving as a committee member of the Hong Kong Blockchain Society R&D division.
|