| NSF Org: |
CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | May 20, 2015 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | May 20, 2015 |
| Award Number: | 1523467 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Sol Greenspan
sgreensp@nsf.gov (703)292-7841 CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | May 15, 2015 |
| End Date: | April 30, 2020 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $500,000.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $500,000.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
3 RUTGERS PLZ NEW BRUNSWICK NJ US 08901-8559 (848)932-0150 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
96 Frelinghuysen Rd. Piscataway NJ US 08854-8018 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | Secure &Trustworthy Cyberspace |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
Cryptography is one of the most important tools in securing data, communication, and cyberinfrastructure. Driven by ever-increasing amounts of data and the associated computational demands, organizations and individuals are outsourcing storage and computation to "the cloud." As our e-mail, medical, financial, and other personal information increasingly reside in systems outside of our direct control and are of increasing value to attackers, the need to simultaneously guarantee privacy, availability of data, and correctness of computations is paramount. This digital reality poses complex challenges to cryptography and requires a paradigm shift in our goals and mode of thinking. This research coordination network, led by DIMACS and the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, will bring together cryptographers and others to depart from the traditional goals of cryptography, namely a relatively narrow focus on secure and authenticated communication, and significantly advance the state of the art toward systems that are simultaneously highly efficient, highly secure, and highly functional.
Specific goals for this RCN project include bringing researchers together to facilitate and catalyze our understanding of: what primitives and performance can be obtained from specific intractability assumptions; fundamental tradeoffs and impossibility results; and how best to drive adoption by system designers and implementers of more secure technologies and practices. The project will start with an intensive Summer 2015 program at the Simons Institute to launch the collaboration and build momentum, followed by a two-year "special focus" led by DIMACS that will sustain the project through Summer 2017 and expand it to include more people and more topics. The project will enable both foundational advances in cryptography and practical advances in its usability, providing improved security, flexibility, and efficiency. These advances have the ability to positively impact society by improving: the robustness of our national cyber infrastructure and cyber-connected physical infrastructure; the security of commercial applications in banking, health care, manufacturing, media, and more; and the extent to which individuals can have control over and confidence in protection of their personal data. Participants will be diverse across a variety of dimensions, including women and other under-represented groups; a mix of junior and senior participants; people from other disciplines and other areas of computer science beyond cryptography; and both industry and academic participants.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The DIMACS/Simons Collaboration in Cryptography project formed a partnership between DIMACS and the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing establishing a research coordination network (RCN) to conduct activities devoted to advancing important goals in cryptography research. These goals included understanding: what primitives and performance can be obtained from specific intractability assumptions; where there are fundamental tradeoffs or impossibility results; and how best to drive adoption by system designers and implementers of more secure technologies and practices. Toward these goals, project activities brought cryptographers together with mathematicians, security researchers, programming language researchers, and software engineers to advance both the foundations and applications of cryptography.
Activities at both DIMACS and the Simons Institute enabled researchers to share information and ideas, form new collaborations, build communities across disciplines and institutions, nurture the development of early-career researchers, and contribute to the integration of research and education. This RCN project included: a large cadre of research visitors and three events at the Simons Institute during the summer of 2015; seven additional research workshops held over the next several years as part of the DIMACS special focus; two additional workshops affiliated with the 2018 and 2019 Crypto conferences; a DIMACS “Reconnect” workshop aimed at professional development for faculty at colleges and universities who wish to learn about a new research area; coordination with two SaTC frontier projects—the Center for Encrypted Functionalities led by UCLA and the Modular Approach to Cloud Security project led by Boston University; sponsorship of NYCryptoDay; and broad participation across a variety of dimensions.
The project began with an intensive program on cryptography at the Simons Institute during the summer in 2015, and it continued with a multi-year Special Focus on Cryptography at DIMACS. The Simons program involved 96 long-term visitors to the Simons institute. Of those, nearly half received direct support from this project, while all participants benefitted from the opportunities for interaction that were presented by being together at the Simons Institute. The Simons program brought together a large part of the community studying the theory of cryptography, enabling new ideas to be exchanged and developed at a tremendous pace. This critical mass facilitated collaboration and led to remarkable productivity and subsequent publications. The Simons program also featured many community-building activities, such as reading groups, a seminar series featuring historical papers, and mentoring lunches for students and postdocs.
The DIMACS special focus began in the fall of 2015 to sustain the energy of the collaborations begun in the Simons program and expand them to include more people and more topics. The “special focus” (SF) is DIMACS’s signature activity. Each special focus is a multi-year program of coordinated activities addressing a broad topic, comprising activities such as workshops, research working groups, tutorials, and research visitors.
The Special Focus on Cryptography sponsored 10 events that involved roughly 900 participants, and it hosted 11 visitors to DIMACS. The special focus events were:
1) DIMACS/Columbia Data Science Institute Workshop on Cryptography for Big Data
2) DIMACS/MACS Workshop on Cryptography for the RAM Model of Computation
3) DIMACS Workshop on Cryptography and its Interactions: Learning Theory, Coding Theory, and Data Structures
4) DIMACS/CEF Workshop on Cryptography and Software Obfuscation
5) DIMACS Workshop on Complexity of Cryptographic Primitives and Assumptions
6) DIMACS Workshop on Outsourcing Computation Securely
7) Beyond Crypto: A TCS Perspective (affiliated with Crypto 2018)
8) DIMACS/MACS Workshop on Usable, Efficient, and Formally Verified Secure Computation
9) Reconnect 2019: Cryptography
10) Workshop on Advanced Cryptography Standardization (affiliated with Crypto 2019)
Participants reported many important results stemming from activities of the project, including: foundational advances in the study of interactive proofs for verifying the correctness of computations delegated to the cloud; progress in understanding the round-complexity of non-malleable cryptography to efficiently enable strong security guarantees in distributed settings; breakthroughs in constructing efficient secure multi-party computation protocols under discrete-log assumptions to break the so-called circuit-size barrier; a foundational study on the bitcoin protocol; and exciting progress on simplifying and weakening the objects and assumptions that imply indistinguishability obfuscation (IO), deepening understanding of this fundamental object, and taking large strides toward the goal of basing the existence of IO on well-studied assumptions. Many of these results enable simpler, more efficient, and ultimately, more practical cryptographic systems. The project also helped to promote standardization efforts that will help to move advanced cryptographic technologies closer to practical use.
Last Modified: 06/13/2020
Modified by: Rebecca N Wright
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