Efficient, Secrecy-Preserving, Provably Correct Computation (and Some Cool Ap...

Google Tech Talks July, 21 2008 ABSTRACT Cryptography is now much more than keeping credit card numbers safe from packet sniffers and laptop thieves. We combine several advances in cryptography theory to construct a model of computation in which a third party securely performs computations for a set of parties who do not trust one another. These parties encrypt their inputs to a computation, then circulate the encrypted values. Our third party decrypts them, performs the computation and then issues correctness proofs of the results: we cryptographically "tie its hands" to do the right thing. In addition to this model of provably correct computation, we will discuss other techniques to control the information flow of secret data to and from the party, so even the third party cannot profitably abuse the secret data before or after it knows it during the computation. Finally, we will illustrate the power of these techniques in e-commerce, and our design decisions, through secure electronic auctions and securities exchanges. Speaker: Dc. Christopher Thorpe Dr. Christopher Thorpe is a computer scientist and entrepreneur who recently completed a Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard, advised by Michael Rabin and David Parkes. Prior to obtaining his Ph.D., he led internationalization at Tellme Networks, after being the internationalization engineer for Yahoo!'s commerce properties and software engineer for Yahoo! Merchant Solutions. Chris joined Yahoo in 1998 when it acquired Viaweb as its Yahoo! Store property; Viaweb was founded by graduate students he knew as an undergraduate at Harvard. He also holds an A.B. from Harvard in Computer Science and Music.