Please note this CyLab seminar is open only to Carnegie Mellon University faculty, students and staff.

Speaker: Brent Waters
Professor, University of Texas at Austin
Director of the Cryptography and Information Security Group, NTT Research 

Talk Title: Ten Years of Indistinguishability Obfuscation

Abstract: A cryptographic code obfuscator takes as input the description of a program P and outputs a program P' that is functionally equivalent to the original but should hide the inner workings of the original program to the maximal extent possible. Ten years ago, the first candidate for indistinguishability obfuscation by Garg, Gentry, Raykova, Sahai and Waters. Since then, the topic has captivated the cryptography community with various works showing how to build it, use it and prove security.

In this talk Dr. Waters will explore the past, present, and possible futures of indistinguishability obfuscation. He will start with overviewing the origins of cryptographic obfuscation.  Then spend the core of the technical portion talking about how one can leverage the notion of indistinguishability obfuscation. Finally, he will talk about future directions.

Bio: Dr. Waters is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and Director of the Cryptography and Information Security group at NTT Research. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, a Microsoft Faculty Fellow, a Sloan Research Fellowship, Packard Science and Engineering Fellowship, and Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) recipient, ACM Fellow and winner of the 2015 ACM Grace Murray Hopper award.

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