Cryptographic Program Obfuscation: Current Capabilities and Challenges

  • Yuriy Polyakov | NJIT

Cryptographic program obfuscation (CPO) enables the evaluation of obfuscated programs/circuits for non-encrypted inputs using cryptographic approaches based on standard (or almost standard) security assumptions. CPO is a hot topic of cryptography that has recently seen remarkable progress, fueled by the DARPA SafeWare program. CPO has a lot of potential high-impact applications for the defense industry, specifically in classification problems and other areas of machine learning. Many recent advances in CPO have come from the cryptographic primitives based on lattices. This talk reviews some of these advances and current capabilities/applications of lattice-based CPO protocols from the perspective of PALISADE, an open-source lattice cryptography library that is being developed by the NJIT Cybersecurity Research Center in collaboration with its partners in academia, government, and industry. The current challenges limiting the practicability of CPO are also discussed.

Speaker Details

Yuriy Polyakov is an Associate Research Professor at the NJIT Department of Computer Science & Cybersecurity Research Center. His primary research interests are applied lattice-based cryptography, homomorphic encryption, and program obfuscation. He is a core contributor to the open-source PALISADE Lattice Cryptography Library. Prior to joining NJIT, he worked as a research scientist at MIT CSAIL and held several senior-level industrial positions. His prior research dealt with time series analysis using statistical physics methods and mathematical modeling of membrane technology processes. He received M.S. in Computer Science from NJIT (2003), PhD in Chemical Engineering from Moscow Polytechnic University (2004), and D.Sc.(Dr. Habil.) in Physics & Mathematics from Karpov Institute of Physical Chemistry (2007). He is a recipient of the Moscow Mayor’s Young Scientist Award (2005).

Series: Microsoft Research Talks