Sharing Sensitive Information with Privacy

Gene Tsudik, Univeristy of California Irvine

Modern society is increasingly dependent on, and fearful of, the availability of electronic information. There are numerous realistic scenarios where sensitive data must be (sometimes reluctantly or suspiciously) shared between two or more entities without mutual trust. As often happens, the research community has foreseen the need for mechanisms to enable limited (privacy-preserving) sharing of sensitive information and a number of effective (if not always efficient) solutions have been proposed. Among them, Private Set Intersection techniques are particularly appealing whenever two parties wish to compute an intersection of their respective sets of items without revealing to each other any other information.

This talk motivates the need for Private Set Intersection (PSI) techniques with various features and privacy properties and illustrates several concrete Private Set Intersection protocols that offer appreciably better efficiency than prior work. We also demonstrate their practicality via experimental results obtained from a prototype implementation and discuss a number of systems issues encountered in developing a toolkit that provides various flavors of PSI.

Speaker Biography

Gene Tsudik is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from USC in 1991 for research on firewalls and Internet access control. Before coming to UCI in 2000, he was a Project Leader at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory (1991-1996) and USC Information Science Institute (1996-2000). Over the years, his research interests included: routing, firewalls, authentication, mobile networks, secure e-commerce, anonymity ad privacy, group communication, digital signatures, key management, mobile ad hoc networks, as well as database privacy and secure storage. He is currently serving as the Director of Secure Computing and Networking Center (SCONCE) at UCI and the Vice-Chair of the Computer Science Department. In 2007, he was on sabbatical at the University of Rome as a Fulbright Senior Scholar. Since 2009, he is the Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Information and Systems Security (TISSEC).