Cybersecurity Lecture Series - Sept. 30

Meet academic and industry leaders for intimate discussions about new cyber threats, trends and technologies.

The weekly Cybersecurity Lecture Series is a free, open-to-the-public lecture from a thought leader who is advancing the field of information security and privacy. Invited speakers include executives and researchers from private companies, government agencies, start-up incubators as well as Georgia Tech faculty and students presenting their research.

Held weekly each Friday at Noon through Dec. 2, lectures are open to all -- students, faculty, industry, government, or simply the curious. Students may register for credit under seminar course CS-8001-INF.

Complimentary lunch provided for registered guests. Please bring your own beverage.

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Featuring Frank Wang on Sept. 30

"Cryptographically Enforced Access Control for User Data in Untrusted Clouds"

Modern web services rob users of low-level control over cloud storage—a user’s single logical data set is scattered across multiple storage silos whose access controls are set by web services, not users. The consequence is that users lack the ultimate authority to determine how their data is shared with other web services.
In this talk, we introduce Sieve, a new platform which selectively (and securely) exposes user data to web services. Sieve has a user-centric storage model: each user uploads encrypted data to a single cloud store, and by default, only the user knows the decryption keys. Given this storage model, Sieve defines an infrastructure to support rich, legacy web applications. Using attribute-based encryption, Sieve allows users to define intuitively understandable access policies that are cryptographically enforceable. Using key homomorphism, Sieve can reencrypt user data on storage providers in situ, revoking decryption keys from web services without revealing new keys to the storage provider. Using secret sharing and two-factor authentication, Sieve protects cryptographic secrets against the loss of user devices like smartphones and laptops. The result is that users can enjoy rich, legacy web applications, while benefiting from cryptographically strong controls over which data a web service can access.

BIO

Frank Wang is a Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology focusing on building secure systems. He is advised by Nickolai Zeldovich and James Mickens. He completed his undergraduate studies at Stanford University, focusing on applied cryptography. He runs the MIT security seminar, and he is also a member of Roughdraft Ventures, which provides small amounts of capital to early stage student startups. He is currently running a summer program for early stage security companies called Cybersecurity Factory. He has interned at the security teams at Google and Facebook as well as consulted for security companies, such as Qualys. When he is not busy worrying about your security, he enjoys going to art museums and being outdoors.