Colloquium

An Overview of Functional Encryption by Dr. Susan Hohenberger, Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University.

Enterprise data is growing at the astounding rate of 70% per year. Companies need to share this data, both internally and externally, to do business, but they simultaneously must protect it from unauthorized access. In this talk, we will overview recent progress in "functional encryption", a new vision of public key encryption, that allows encrypted data to be tagged with attributes and then decryption keys can be issued based on policies over these attributes. For instance, a company could grant an employee a key that unlocks all files for "human recourses" regarding "college hiring" between March and April. A primary technical challenge in this area was realizing a solution that was collusion-resistant; that is, where Alice with a key for "human resources" from June to July and Bob with a key for "accounts payable" from March to April cannot combine their keys to open files for "human resources" from March to April. We discuss industrial applications of this technology in the cloud storage and mobile space, as well as a $15 million effort by the Office of the National Coordinator to use this technology to secure electronic medical records.

This talk is for a general audience and no background in cryptography is assumed.

Dr. Susan Hohenberger is an Ohio native. She earned a B.S. in Computer Engineering from The Ohio State University in 2000 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006, where she was advised by Professor Ronald Rivest (the 'R' in RSA). She has published over thirty original research papers in cryptography and computer security, earning her an NSF CAREER award, a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, and a Google Faculty Research Award. Her research has been covered by BBC News, slashdot, The Economist and Scientific American. A faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University since 2007, Dr. Hohenberger is also the president of Zeutro LLC, a data security startup.

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