Cloud computing has undoubtedly become the key enabler for processing and analyzing massive amounts of information. However, even more and more personal data reside in the cloud nowadays and clients are worried about their privacy. One way to ensure data confidentiality is to use simple, over-the-self encryption (e.g., AES). Unfortunately, such a technique does not allow the server storing the ciphertexts to perform any meaningful computation (e.g., keyword search) on them. This limits the applicability of cloud computing significantly.
I will present recent work (CCS 2012 and NDSS 2014) on the theory and practice of Searchable Encryption (SE), a set of techniques that we have developed to address the above problem. The talk is going to focus on encrypted single-keyword search for static and dynamic data. Towards the end I will talk about open theoretical problems in the field, various exciting SE systems that we are developing at Maryland, as well as other research on cloud security that I plan to work on in the next five years.
Charalampos (Babis) Papamanthou is an assistant professor in the ECE department at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he joined in 2013 after a postdoc at UC Berkeley. At Maryland he is also affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) and he is a member of the newly-founded Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2).
He works on the areas of applied cryptography and computer security—and especially on technologies, systems and theory for secure and private cloud computing. His PhD is in Computer Science from Brown University (2011) and he also holds and MSc in Computer Science from the University of Crete (2005), where he was a member of ICS-FORTH. He has published in venues and journals spanning theoretical and applied cryptography, systems and database security, graph algorithms and visualization and operations research.
