CrySP Speaker Series on Privacy

This speaker series is made possible by an anonymous charitable donation in memory of cypherpunks and privacy advocates Len Sassaman, Hugh Daniel, Hal Finney, and Caspar Bowden.

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Modern Secure Data Management

Radu Sion, Stony Brook University

[Download (MP4)] [View on Youtube]

June 18, 2014 2:30pm, in DC 1302

Abstract

Digital societies and markets increasingly mandate consistent procedures for the access, processing and storage of information. In the United States alone, over 10,000 such regulations can be found in financial, life sciences, health care and government sectors, including the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, etc. A recurrent theme in these regulations is the need for regulatory compliant storage as an underpinning to ensure data confidentiality, access integrity and authentication; provide audit trails, guaranteed deletion, and data migration.

However, without the availability of practical, technology-backed enforcement solutions full regulatory compliance cannot be realized.

In this work we posit that the seemingly contradictory requirements of security, efficiency and low cost can in fact be reconciled gracefully via intelligent deployment of cryptographic and system security constructs.

To this end we design and prototype a number of fully functional relational database and file systems, addressing data privacy, query authentication and data retention, while offering increased functionality, higher efficiency and lower costs.

Bio

Radu is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University (on leave) and currently the CEO of Private Machines Inc. He remembers when gophers were digging through the Internets and bits were running at slower paces of 512 per second. He is also interested in efficient computing with a touch of cyber-security paranoia, raising rabbits on space ships and sailing catamarans of the Hobie variety.