The UMBC CSEE Seminar Series Presents

Practical Engineering of Plaintext
Private Information Retrieval Systems

Dr. Russell Fink

Chief Engineer, Cyber Operations Branch,
Johns Hopkins University / Applied Physics Laboratory

1-2pm Friday, 4 November 2016, ITE 229

Cloud computing has come a long way in the last decade, with many advances in supported platforms, security, and cost effectiveness. As organizations are increasingly turning to the cloud to outsource their big data storage and processing needs, both problems and opportunities arise for understanding and analyzing large repositories of data.

One problem in particular is querying large data in a safe and secure way – querying a large data set can compromise search privacy, revealing the interests, motivations, and true identity of the data querier to the data owner, hindering legitimate uses including data analytics, security, and law enforcement. Alice, wishing to search Bob’s queue of plaintext data, may turn to Private Information Retrieval (PIR) techniques to maintain her privacy without sacrificing bandwidth or deploying a trusted device in Bob’s spaces.

We have prototyped a PIR system based on the homomorphic Paillier cryptosystem and Bethencourt/Song search method, and discovered important engineering techniques along the way that are useful for deploying a scalable system. In this talk, I will introduce and motivate the PIR problem and describe the Paillier homomorphic retrieval system and Bethencourt’s technique. I will give an overview of our specific advances, notably, a novel technique for private regular expression pattern searching over plaintext, including an algorithm for resisting a privacy attack against the resulting search automaton.

Russell A. (“Russ”) Fink is the Chief Engineer of the Cyber Operations Branch, Asymmetric Operations Sector, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park; a Master’s degree in computer systems management from the University of Maryland, University College; and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County for his work on electronic voting and trustworthy computing. His research interests include systems security engineering, trusted computing, machine learning, and privacy preserving cryptographic applications.

Organizers: Professors Tulay Adali () and Alan T. Sherman ()

About the CSEE Seminar Series: The UMBC Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering presents technical talks on current significant research projects of broad interest to the Department and the research community. Each talk is free and open to the public. We welcome your feedback and suggestions for future talks.