CSIS Seminar

Efficient Cryptographic Tools for Privacy-Preserving Applications

Speaker:   Foteini Baldimtsi
When:   Monday, April 6, 2015, 9:30am - 10:30pm
Where:   Research Hall, Room 163, Fairfax Campus

Abstract

The benefits of electronic transactions are numerous, but they come with a price: the technologies used often overlook the privacy of their users. Achieving privacy in a digital world is a rather challenging problem, privacy-preserving solutions are harder to construct and, at the same time, are significantly more computationally intensive than privacy-intrusive ones. In this talk I show how to combine techniques from cryptography and systems security to get all the benefits of electronic transactions without sacrificing user privacy and without giving up efficiency.

I will focus on two major sub-domains of privacy-preserving technologies: anonymous credentials (the core ingredient to private authorization), and anonymous electronic payments. In the first part of my talk I will present Anonymous Credentials Light, the most efficient and provable secure anonymous credential scheme. In the second part, I will describe a privacy-preserving protocol for electronic payments and show an efficient smartphone implementation of it for the public transportation scenario.

Speaker Bio

Foteini Baldimtsi is a Post-Doctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science at Boston University. Her research interests are in the general area of cryptography, security and data privacy with a special focus on the design and implementation of provably secure private authorization and electronic payment schemes. She received her PhD and MSc in Computer Science from Brown University in 2014 and 2011, and has worked as a researcher at IBM and Microsoft Research.