Title: Secure Outsourced Databases: Past, Present, and Future

 Abstract: End-to-end encryption promises to protect against data leaks and mass surveillance. But how can end-to-end encryption be reconciled with functionality like cloud computing, targeted advertising, and search? This talk will take a look at the specific case of secure outsourced databases, where a client wants to outsource its data storage to an untrusted server, ensuring privacy against the server while maintaining the ability to perform queries. We overview a new paradigm that has evolved to solve this problem called *function-revealing encryption* (FRE), where encryption purposely leaks some information about the data. We study some basic types of FRE that have been deployed in real-world systems. We then study security of outsourced database protocols using FRE, pointing to limitations of naive such protocols and paving the way for ``next-generation'' solutions.

Bio: Adam O'Neill is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Georgetown University. He has also held a visiting faculty position in the Cryptographic Technology Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, under the direction of Alexandra Boldyreva. His research interests are in cryptography and information security.