Computer science professor Amit Sahai and his research team have received a $1.2M National Science Foundation grant for research on secure computation, a powerful concept from cryptography that enables collaboration in the absence of trust. Despite its great potential for solving practical problems in collaborative situations, secure computation has not yet been widely adopted in practice because the dominant paradigm for achieving strong security has relied on zero-knowledge proofs, and yields protocols that are too inefficient even for simple computations.
Sahai's research team is developing radically different new architectures for efficient secure computation protocols that bypass the need for the previously used zero-knowledge proofs. Their architectures are based on a novel principled approach to developing new secure computation protocols with consequences to both the theory and practice of modern cryptography. Their research will identify new (partial) security properties inherent in simple protocols and will study how these properties can add up to strong security guarantees through carefully developed methods for composing protocols.
Sahai shares the joint research grant with his former Ph.D. student, Manoj Prabhakaran, who is now an associate professor at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana.
