Title: Enabling Secure Computing through Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Speaker: Kurt Rohloff, BBN Technologies

Abstract: One of the first major breakthroughs of computer science in the 21st century is the demonstration of public-key Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). FHE allows sensitive data to be encrypted such that arbitrary programs can be securely run over the encrypted data in cloud computing environments where the decrypted output is equivalent to the result of running the original algorithm on the unencrypted data. Unfortunately, FHE was not practical when it was discovered - it was several orders of magnitude too inefficient. This talk will review recent advances in FHE, from both a theory and implementation perspective. We will discuss advances in lattice mathematics, algorithm design and implementation approaches that are leading the way to multiple orders of magnitude improvement in FHE implementations. We discuss our implementations in both software and parallel computation devices.

Bio: Dr. Kurt Rohloff is a senior scientist in the Distributed Systems research group at BBN Technologies. Dr. Rohloff’s areas of technical expertise include large-scale distributed computing, secure computing and scalable algorithm design. Dr. Rohloff is the Principal Investigator for the SIPHER team in the DARPA PROCEED program. Dr. Rohloff was the Principal Investigator on the AFRL Scalable Cloud IM Innovation Technology And Research (SCIMITAR) project. The SCIMITAR project resulted in the demonstration of a highly scalable cloud-based information brokering capability. Dr. Rohloff is the Chief Designer and Lead Architect of the SHARD triple-store, a highly scalable storage system and query engine for graph data. SHARD has been benchmarked to perform faster than current commercial triple-stores. Dr. Rohloff received his Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech and his Master's and PhD. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan.