Presentation:
High-speed communication networks have made it commonplace to outsource data storage and processing to large computing centers, which have become prime targets for hackers. Indeed, large volumes of sensitive data are concentrated with these hosting providers, attracting attention from all sides and creating the risk of both external and internal attacks.
Encrypting data before sending it for storage is a simple and effective solution, but it remains simplistic and limiting: processing the data requires bringing it back locally, it is not possible to perform shared computations between multiple parties, nor to share evaluations.
Recent cryptographic techniques make it possible to reconcile outsourced data storage and processing with guaranteed confidentiality from the hosting provider. It is even possible to ensure that the correct computations have been performed, despite the secrecy of the data being handled.
In this talk, we will attempt to unravel the magic of modern cryptography by presenting some of these techniques for computing on confidential data.
Mr. David Pointcheval
David Pointcheval is a Research Director at CNRS, Director of the Computer Science Department of ENS (DIENS), and head of the DIENS cryptography team, shared with CNRS and INRIA.
A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, following a PhD in computer science obtained in 1996, he joined CNRS in 1998 within the ENS computer science laboratory. His research focuses on cryptography for communications security, with provable security as a central objective — a field he helped pioneer in the mid-1990s. He has proposed constructions and security analyses for encryption, signature, and key agreement mechanisms, and now focuses particularly on privacy-related challenges.
He is the author of more than 150 international publications and co-inventor of more than 10 patents.
He has received two ERC grants from the European Commission on cloud security, in 2013 and 2020. In 2021, he received the CNRS Silver Medal as well as the RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics.
