Defence of dissertation in the field of computer science, Jian Liu, M.Sc.

How to protect your privacy while using cloud-assisted services?

Jian Liu,  M.Sc., will defend the dissertation "Privacy-Preserving Cloud-Assisted Services" on 18 June 2018 at 12 noon at the Aalto University School of Science. In this disertation, cryptographic techniques (e.g., homomorphic encryption, secret sharing, garbled circuits) are applied to cloud-assisted services to protect user privacy.

Despite the benefits of cloud-assisted services, they put users’ privacy at risk since the data stored in the cloud and/or the requests submitted to the cloud may contain sensitive information. On the other hand, unless carefully designed, this service paradigm may nonetheless fail to protect the confidentiality of service providers’ business assets (e.g., malware databases or machine learning models) against malicious users. This dissertation shows how to leverage cryptographic technologies and trusted execution environments to design cloud-assisted services such that end users can protect their privacy, and if needed, service providers can ensure that their security/privacy requirements are not violated. We provide a general definition for privacy-preserving cloud-assisted services, investigate the privacy issues in three cloud-assisted services: lookup service, prediction service and storage service, and propose solutions on how to make them privacy-preserving.

Dissertation press release (pdf)

Opponent: Professor Dr. Moti Yung, Columbia University, United States

Custos: Professor N.Asokan, Aalto University, School of Science, Department of Computer Science