Keynote: Encrypted Distributed Systems
Abstract: Distributed computing is at the heart of modern system architectures and infrastructures. But as security and privacy have increasingly become critical to every organization, modern cryptography is making its way into core systems. In this talk, I will describe work that focuses on using modern cryptographic techniques in large scale practical distributed systems in order to improve their security and privacy guarantees. I will show how both cryptographic techniques and distributed systems need to be adapted to make this work and how to think about the security of these new encrypted distributed systems.
Keywords: Cryptography, distributed systems
Speaker Biography
Seny Kamara is a Principal Scientist at MongoDB and an Associate Professor at Brown University. Before joining Brown, he was a researcher at Microsoft Research.
His research is in cryptography and is driven by real-world problems from privacy, security and surveillance. He has worked extensively on the design and cryptanalysis of encrypted search algorithms, which are efficient algorithms to search on end-to-end encrypted data. He maintains interests in various aspects of theory and systems. He has been appointed to two National Academies of Sciences committees on encryption and has provided testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Financial Services Committee and its Committee on Space, Science and Technology.
At Brown, he co-directs the Encrypted Systems Lab and the Center for Technological Responsibility and is affiliated with the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies, the Policy Lab and the Data Science Initiative.
Acknowledgements: I would like thank my collaborators on this line of work: Archita Agarwal and Tarik Moataz.