Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Dakshita Khurana (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) - Cryptographic Advances in Reasoning about Adversaries

Speaker: Dakshita Khurana , University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Talk Title: Cryptographic Advances in Reasoning about Adversaries

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: A key challenge in cryptography is to ensure that a protocol resists all computationally feasible attacks, even when an adversary decides to follow a completely arbitrary and unpredictable strategy.
This often turns out to be notoriously difficult -- for example, proofs of security must typically extract an adversary's implicit input, but this is at odds with other goals like privacy, which require that inputs be hidden and difficult to extract.

In this talk, I will describe my work that reimagines how we reason about adversaries, thereby settling foundational questions in classical and quantum protocol design. On the classical front, these insights enable efficient verification of computations while preserving privacy, and immunize protocols against coordinated attacks on the internet. On the quantum front, these methods help exploit the "destructive" nature of measurements and open up fundamentally new possibilities for cryptography. I will discuss examples that leverage quantum information to (1) weaken the assumptions needed for core tasks like secure computation on distributed private data, and (2) allow outsourcing computations on sensitive data while also verifying that data was deleted after processing.


This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium

Biography: Dakshita Khurana is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on cryptography and its interactions with quantum information. She has made several contributions to secure protocol design, including to succinct and zero-knowledge proof systems, non-malleable protocols and secure computation. Her work has also impacted fields beyond cryptography, e.g., by establishing the hardness of finding Nash equilibria under standard lattice assumptions. Her recent research enabling secure computation from weak cryptographic structure in the quantum regime was invited as one of the (long) plenary talks at QIP.
Her research has also been recognized via invitations to the SIAM Journal on Computing, awarded to a select few papers at STOC and FOCS.

Dakshita is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, Visa Research faculty award, and a Graduate of Last Decade (GOLD) Alumni award from IIT-Delhi. In addition, her work has been funded through grants and gifts from the NSF, DARPA, C3AI and Jump Arches. She was named to Forbes List of 30 under 30 in Science and awarded a Google Research Fellowship at the Simons Institute, Berkeley. Her thesis work was previously recognized with a UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship, a UCLA CS Outstanding PhD Student Award and Outstanding Graduate Awards from Symantec and CISCO.



Host: Jiapeng Zhang

Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair