Preserving privacy through processing encrypted data
| Dates: | 20 February 2019 |
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| Times: | 14:00 - 15:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | Department of Computer Science |
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| Who is it for: | External researchers, Adults, Alumni, Current University students, General public |
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| Speaker: | Miriam Leeser |
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Join us for this School research seminar, part of the Data science seminar series and hosted by Dr Dirk Koch.
Secure Function Evaluation (SFE) allows an interested party to evaluate a function over private data without learning anything about the inputs other than the outcome of this computation. This offers a strong privacy guarantee: SFE enables, e.g., a medical researcher, a statistician, or a data analyst, to conduct a study over private, sensitive data, without jeopardising the privacy of the study's participants (patients, online users, etc.). Nevertheless, applying SFE to big data poses several challenges, most significantly in the excessive processing time for applications.
In this talk, I describe Garbled Circuits (GCs), a technique for implementing SFE that can be applied to any problem that can be described as a Boolean circuit. GC is a particularly good application to accelerate with FPGAs due to the good match between GC implementations and FPGA circuits. As our goal is to use GC for extremely large problems, including machine learning algorithms, we propose to address these problems by running GCs on clusters of machines equipped with FPGAs in the data center to accelerate the processing. In this talk, I will present our progress and challenges with this approach.
Speaker
Miriam Leeser
Role: Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Organisation: Northeastern University
Biography: Miriam Leeser has been doing research in FPGAs for decades, and has done ground breaking research in floating point implementations, unsupervised learning and most recently privacy preserving data processing. She has been a faculty member at Northeastern since 1996, where she is head of the Reconfigurable Computing Laboratory and a member of the Computer Engineering group. She is a senior member of ACM, IEEE and SWE.). She is currently on sabbatical at Maynooth University in Ireland and received the prestigious Fulbright Scholar Award in 2018 to support this sabbatical.
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
L.T 1.4
Kilburn Building
Manchester
