Towards Optimal Secure Computation Protocols

Abstract: Secure computation allows a set of mutually distrusting parties to compute a joint function of their private inputs such that the parties only learn the output of the functionality and nothing else about the inputs of the other parties. Secure computation is one of the central primitives in cryptography that encompasses several cryptographic abstractions and has many practical applications. The seminal results from the 1980s showed that every efficiently computable functionality can also be computed securely. However, these protocols were prohibitively inefficient and could only be considered as feasibility results. One of the central problems in cryptography is to construct secure computation protocols that are optimal in all efficiency parameters. In this talk, I will give an overview of my recent works that make progress towards constructing such optimal secure computation protocols.

Bio: Akshayaram Srinivasan is a final-year Ph.D. student in the theory group at UC Berkeley. He received his B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT-Madras in 2015. He is broadly interested in theoretical computer science and in particular, in the theory and applications of cryptography. He has published research papers in top conferences in cryptography such as Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), Crypto, Eurocrypt, and TCC. His research has been recognized with the best paper award at Eurocrypt 2018 and invitations to the Journal of Cryptology.