Jason Healey | Building a Defensible Cyberspace
Cyber attacks top the list of national security threats and also pose a threat to our personal finances, as recent data breaches at banks, credit card companies and businesses have shown. One of the main reasons that cyber threats are escalating is that for decades it has been far easier to attack than defend. Columbia’s School for International and Public Affairs (SIPA) has convened a New York Cyber Task Force to bring together policymakers and technologists in academia, banks, and other industries, to determine how to reverse the problem so that a dollar of defense buys more than a dollar of attack. A defensible cyberspace has checks and balances and a broad set of stakeholders acting as stewards. It can adapt to changing conditions, recover quickly after failure and scale up solutions. I will discuss what technologies and policies have been most successful to date and what more is needed.
Tal Malkin | Secure Computation: Encrypted Search and Beyond
Secure computation is one of the most exciting achievements in cryptographic research in the last few decades. It allows mutually distrustful parties to jointly perform computations on private data without revealing any extraneous information. Once a theoretical field, secure computation is becoming increasingly more practical and relevant to real-world applications. I will discuss a private database management system that we have developed, Blind Seer. This system allows clients to perform a rich set of queries over an encrypted database while keeping the data and query hidden. Blind Seer runs efficiently on a 100-million record, 10-terabyte database — two to 10 times slower than running insecure MySQL queries on a non-encrypted database.
