Lectures:: MWF 10am-10:50am (290 Hickey)
Office Hours: By appointment.
Course Description: We will survey some classic ideas and recent developments in privacy-preserving mechanisms. The class will be self-contained -- no special cryptographic knowledge will be assumed.
Textbook: There is no required textbook for this class. We will work from published papers, and I might distribute lecture notes at the beginning of the quarter for the crypto review. An old online resource for basic cryptographic concepts which is still very good is CRC Handbook of Applied Cryptography, Menezes et al., 1997. For a more modern treatment of basic cryptographic concepts, the following textbook is very good: Introduction to Modern Cryptography, by J. Katz and Y. Lindell, Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2008.
Course Project: Write a 5-10 page paper, and give a 25-minute in-class presentation, on an interesting application or extension of a topic covered in class.
Tentative Outline:
Privacy Overview
Carlisle Adams has an interesting
classification of privacy methods for online
environments here .
Crypto review
number theory basics, secret sharing, pseudorandom
generator, pseudorandom function, symmetric key primitives
(encryption, MAC), public key primitives (key agreement, encryption,
signature). I will distribute lecture notes at the beginning of the
quarter for this material.
Anonymous Communication
Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return
Addresses, and Digital Pseudonyms, Chaum, CACM 1981.
Zero Knowledge
Zero-Knowledge twenty years after its
invention (Part I), Goldreich 2004.
Proofs of Partial Knowledge
and Simplified Design of Witness Hiding Protocols,
Cramer et al, Crypto 1994.
Secret Ballot Election
A Secure and Optimally Efficient
Multi-Authority Election Scheme, Cramer et al., Eurocrypt
1997.
Electing a University President
using Open-Audit Voting: Analysis of real-world use of Helios
, Adida et al., EVT/WOTE 2009.
Private Selection
Priced Oblivious Transfer: How to
Sell Digital Goods, Aiello et al., Eurocrypt 2001.
New Techniques for Private
Stream Searching, Bethencourt et al. ACM TISSEC 2009. (see
toolkit here.)
Secure Computation
Secure Two-Party Computation is
Practical, Pinkas et al., 2009.
Secure Multiparty Computation
Goes Live, Bogetoft et al., Financial Crypto 2009.
Anonymous Signatures
Threshold Ring
Signatures and applications to ad-hoc groups,
Bresson et al., Crpyto 2002.
Differential Privacy
Differential Private
Recommender Systems: Building Privacy into the NetFlix Prize
Contenders, McSherry and Mironov, ACM SIGKDD 2009.