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PRODID:-//Memento EPFL//
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SUMMARY:IC Colloquium: Privacy despite mass surveillance
DTSTART:20180301T101500
DTEND:20180301T113000
DTSTAMP:20260510T164658Z
UID:3b053bf19115c4218ba290bc754600ae0e8e20fd4f6115d0bbd38c89
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:By: Sebastian Angel - UT Austin\nIC Faculty candidate\n\nAbstr
 act:\nIn the past decade there has been a significant increase in the coll
 ection of personal information and communication metadata (with whom users
 \ncommunicate\, when\, how often) by governments\, Internet providers\, co
 mpanies\, and universities. While there are many ongoing efforts to secure
 \nusers' communications\, namely end-to-end encryption messaging apps and 
 E-mail services\, safeguarding metadata remains elusive.\nI will present a
  system called Pung that makes progress on this front. Pung lets users exc
 hange messages over the Internet without revealing\nany information in the
  process. Perhaps surprisingly\, Pung achieves this strong privacy propert
 y even when all providers (ISPs\, companies\, etc.) are\narbitrarily malic
 ious.\n \nI will also present several improvements to a general cryptogra
 phic building block called private information retrieval (PIR) that underl
 ies many privacy\npreserving systems including Pung. Among these improveme
 nts\, I will discuss SealPIR\, a new PIR library that achieves orders of m
 agnitude more network\nefficiency than the state-of-the-art. Finally\, I w
 ill briefly touch on some of my work on verifiable computation and interfa
 cing with malicious USB devices.\n\nBio:\nSebastian Angel is a Ph.D. candi
 date at The University of Texas at Austin and a visiting academic at New Y
 ork University's Courant Institute of \nMathematical Sciences. His resear
 ch interests are in systems\, security\, and networking.\n\nMore informati
 on
LOCATION:BC 420 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==BC%20420
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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