YOSO: Efficient "You Only Speak Once" Secure Computation

Receiving the Sapere Aude grant will allow me to establish my own research team, and to grow as a supervisor and a leader. It will also allow me to strengthen my international collaborations and relationships through travel and research visits.

Project description: As data breaches become more common, companies have transferred many digital tasks to decentralised platforms - such as data clouds and blockchains - to eliminate single points of failure. However, distributed systems are still susceptible to attacks by sophisticated adversaries who can target multiple machines in a system at once. The You Only Speak Once (YOSO) framework is a novel paradigm for large-scale secure distributed processing of private data. In a YOSO protocol, each machine sends at most one message; by hiding who will send future messages, YOSO protocols can achieve unprecedented asymptotic communication efficiency while protecting the data from the most powerful kind of adversary. Existing YOSO protocols only provide security under unrealistic conditions, or do not scale well. The goal of this project is to eliminate these drawbacks, bringing YOSO closer to practice.

Estimate of impact: I hope that this project will help make secure and efficient computation in large-scale distributed environments such as clouds and blockchains more feasible. This, in turn, might have applications in many scenarios where mutually distrusting parties wish to outsource a computation on their sensitive data. An example might be hospitals in different countries wishing to pool their medical records for use in medical research, without compromising their patients' privacy by revealing those records to any external parties.

Read more about Sophia and her project.