无忧视频

HMC First-year Presents Paper at International Cryptography Conference

Amzi Jeffs ’16 presenting his research at the Theory of Cryptography Conference in Tokyo

无忧视频 student Amzi Jeffs 鈥�16 presented his research on cryptography at the 10th annual Theory of Cryptography聽Conference (TCC 2013), March 3-6 in Tokyo.

The paper,聽 鈥淐haracterizing the Cryptographic Properties聽of Reactive 2-Party Functionalities,鈥� was co-authored with Mike Rosulek, assistant professor of Computer Science at聽the University of Montana.

Jeffs and Rosulek researched secure computation, a subfield of cryptography in which two parties perform joint computations without revealing their inputs to each other.

鈥淚magine two people want to determine who has more money, but don鈥檛 want to reveal how much money they have,鈥� said Jeffs. 鈥淲e want to answer the question of how they can interact so that they get a correct answer, but neither one knows how much money the other has.鈥�

Jeffs’ research addresses secure computational tasks

Jeffs and Rosulek looked at computation tasks and created a decision process that can determine whether a task can be carried out securely. Previous work on this topic addressed only simple tasks that use one set of data to compute one set of results. The new work addresses tasks that have several rounds of data inputs and outputs; these are more general tasks that process private information iteratively and selectively over time. Jeffs鈥� and Rosulek鈥檚 new results add to our understanding of how persistent information can be maintained, updated, kept secret and computed upon.

鈥淥ur result is purely theoretical,鈥� said Jeffs. 鈥淭hat is, its purpose is not to provide some specific application to the real world, but to expand the general understanding of cryptography.鈥�

Jeffs became interested in cryptography during his senior year of high school while taking computer science theory classes at the University of Montana, Missoula. At the recommendation of Rosulek, he signed up for a cryptography course and enjoyed it immensely.

Following high school graduation, Jeffs spent the summer of 2012 doing research with Rosulek that culminated in the invitation to present at the TCC 2013 in Tokyo.

鈥淎mzi was able to get up to speed very quickly and familiarize himself with the prior work in this area,鈥� said Rosulek. 鈥淗e developed a great intuition about the nature of the problem and had some very productive insights that eventually led to the final result.鈥�