The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

Engineering Notes on Homomorphic
Private Information Retrieval

Russ Fink
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab

11:15am-12:30pm, Friday, 4 December 4 2015, ITE 231

For two years, we have been investigating applications of private information retrieval (PIR) using the additive homomorphic scheme designed by Paillier that forms the basis of a space efficient PIR system by Ostrovsky, Skeith, and Bethencourt. We have implemented a working prototype and gained some insights about the technique, and identified improvements to make it practical to real-world privacy problems. I will present an overview of the technique, present a real world use case, and discuss our technical contributions and ongoing challenges.

Dr. Russ Fink is Chief Engineer of the Enterprise Security Group at APL. He earned the PhD from UMBC with a dissertation on applying trustworthy computing to voting.

Host: Alan T. Sherman,