There is a sign up schedule for this talk:
http

://www.cs.utexas.edu/department/webevent/utcs/events/cgi/list_events.cgi

Type of Talk: FACULTY CANDIDATE

Speaker/Affiliation: Brent Wa

ters/SRI International Computer Science Lab

Date/Time: Tuesday Ap

ril 1 2008 11:00 a.m.

Location: ACES 2.302

Host: Vitaly S

hmatikov

Talk Title: Functional Encryption: Beyond Public Key Cryp

tography

Talk Abstract:
Data privacy is a ubiquitous concern. It
is an issue that is
confronted by nearly every organization from healt

h care
providers and the payment card industry to web commerce
site

s. Protecting data storage servers by securing the
network perimeter is
becoming increasingly difficult given
the number of attack vectors ava

ilable and trends toward
distributed data storage. Consequently sever

al enterprises
are looking to realize access control by encryption. Enc

rypting
data reduces the problem of data privacy from protecting
all
stored data to protecting small secret keys. While current
encryption

systems provide a powerful security tool there exist
fundamental limita

tions for realistic sharing of private data. In
particular there is an

inherent gap between how we want to
share data and our ability to expre

ss access policies in current
encryption systems.

In this talk I
will present a new concept called functional
encryption that puts forth
a new vision for how encryption
systems should work. In functional en

cryption a data provider
directly expresses his data sharing policy du

ring the encryption
procedure itself. Likewise a recipient will be abl

e to decrypt
and access data if and only if she possesses matching secr

et
key credentials. By allowing a provider to encrypt directly and
eliminating the need to locate individual recipients we can build
muc

h simpler systems. I will describe the challenges in realizing
function

al encryption systems as well as the techniques I have
developed to ove

rcome them. In addition I will discuss work in
bringing these methods

to practice.