This is the first in a series of guest posts highlighting new research in applied cryptography. This post is written by Travis Mayberry from Northeastern University. Note that Travis is graduating this year and will be on the job market. ORAM Background Oblivious RAM is a very hot research topic right now. As Seny has … Continue reading
If you follow me on Twitter you have no doubt heard my occasional outbursts and rants on what I perceive to be biases in the current publication model in cryptography. In short, I think that top cryptography conferences are heavily biased against certain areas of cryptography and for others. Some of the areas that I … Continue reading
This is an announcement for a workshop that I am organizing in conjunction with the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS). Due to the Snowden disclosures, mass surveillance has become one of the most highly-discussed and controversial issues in politics, policy, technology and international affairs. Modern surveillance, however, relies heavily on technology and, therefore, our community … Continue reading
One of the best things about working at MSR is the internship program. For a sense of what an MSR internship is like, I recommend this essay by Philip Guo. In this post, I want to personally reflect on the MSR internship program and provide some context about how things have worked for me in … Continue reading
People often ask me how to get started in cryptography. What’s interesting is that most of the time they also want to know how I personally got started. This is interesting to me because it suggests that people are looking for more than a list of books or papers to read or set of exercises … Continue reading
Most people have heard by now about the closing of the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Campus (SVC) Lab. It definitely came as a shock to everyone (including other MSR researchers) and many people have commented online about what the lab meant to them and about all the great research that came out of it. There … Continue reading
This is the fifth part of a series on searching on encrypted data. See parts 1, 2 and 3 and 4. In the previous post we covered the most secure way to search on encrypted data: oblivious RAMs (ORAM). I always recommend ORAM-based solutions for encrypted search whenever possible; namely, for small- to moderate-size data … Continue reading
One of the most interesting aspects of the NSA metadata program is whether it is legal or not. Unlike the questions we usually think about in computer science, this question has no definitive answer. The program is legal in some sense, but the logic needed for the argument to go through is so questionable that … Continue reading
I just got back from Barbados where I attended the Financial Cryptography and Data Security conference. It was a great event overall with many interesting talks and two great workshops. One workshop was on Bitcoin and was the most successful Financial Crypto workshop in history! Though I haven’t personally worked on Bitcoin, one of the … Continue reading
This is the fourth part of a series on searching on encrypted data. See parts 1, 2 and 3. In the previous posts we covered two different ways to search on encrypted data. The first was based on property-preserving encryption (in particular, on deterministic encryption), achieved sub-linear search time but had weak security properties. The … Continue reading
