Dr Elaine Shi from Computer Science Dept. of University of Maryland made a presentation - Practical Oblivious Computation: From Theory to Hardware to Compiler - to CEE students last Fridany Jan 3, 2014.
She first introduced in her presentation a new binary-tree based paradigm of constructing Oblivious RAM which led to extremely simple constructions. Within this framework, she described Path ORAM. Under reasonable assumptions about the block size, Path ORAM achieved O(log n) bandwidth overhead with just a little more than O(log n) trusted cache --- this was nearly optimal in light of Goldreich and Ostrovsky's lower bound. Based on Path ORAM, she and her team implemented the first real-life ORAM-capable secure processor prototype called Phantom. They run real-world programs such as sqlite on top of Phantom, and demonstrated reasonable practical performance. After that, she moved further to describe programming language techniques that could compile a program into its memory-trace oblivious equivalent, while achieving order-of-magnitude speedup in comparison with the naive approach of placing all variables in a single, large ORAM. At the end of presentation, Dr Shi briefly described a vision of building a cloud computing platform secure against physical attacks.
Dr Elaine Shi completed her Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University in 2008, and prior to joining Maryland, she also worked at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and UC Berkeley as a research scientist. In her research, Elaine takes a theory-meets-practice approach towards the design of secure and privacy-preserving systems. She has a broad range of expertise covering secure software systems, cryptography, network security, and language-base security. Her work on practical Oblivious RAM won a Best Student Paper award in ACM CCS'13, and was a finalist for the AT&T Best Applied Security Paper Award. Elaine also won the IJCNN/Kaggle Social Network Challenge in 2011.
