Cryptographic Tools for Privacy Preservation and Verifiable Randomness
Licentiate thesis, 2018

Our society revolves around communication. The Internet is the biggest, cheapest and fastest digital communication channel used nowadays.
Due to the continuous increase of daily communication among people worldwide,
more and more data might be stolen, misused or tampered.
We require to protect our communications and data by achieving privacy and confidentiality.

Despite the two terms, "privacy" and "confidentiality",are often used as synonymous, in cryptography they are modelled in very different ways.
Intuitively, cryptography can be seen as a tool-box in which every scheme, protocol or primitive is a tool that can be used to solve specific problems and provide specific communication security guarantees such as confidentiality. Privacy is instead not easy to describe and capture since it often depends on "which" information is available, "how" are these data used and/or "who" has access to our data.

This licentiate thesis raises research questions and proposes solutions related to: the possibility of defining encryption schemes that provide both strong security and privacy guarantees; the importance of designing cryptographic protocols that are compliant with real-life privacy-laws or regulations; and the necessity of defining a post-quantum mechanism to achieve the verifiability of randomness.

In more details, the thesis achievements are:
(a) defining a new class of encryption schemes, by weakening the correctness property, that achieves Differential Privacy (DP), i.e., a mathematically sound definition of privacy;
(b) formalizing a security model for a subset of articles in the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), designing and implementing a cryptographic protocol based on the proposed GDPR-oriented security model, and;
(c) proposing a methodology to compile a post-quantum interactive protocol for proving the correct computation of a pseudorandom function into a non-interactive one, yielding a post-quantum mechanism for verifiable randomness.

Confidentiality

Verifiable Randomness

Differential Privacy

GDPR

Privacy

Cryptography

Room ES53, EDIT Building, Maskingränd 2, Chalmers
Opponent: Paul Stankovski, Electrical and Information Technology, Lund University, Sweden

Author

Carlo Brunetta

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Networks and Systems (Chalmers)

Lattice-Based Simulatable VRFs: Challenges and Future Directions

Journal of Internet Services and Information Security,;Vol. 8(2018)p. 57-69

Journal article

HIKE: Walking the Privacy Trail

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics),;Vol. 11124 LNCS(2018)p. 43-66

Paper in proceeding

A Differentially Private Encryption Scheme

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics),;Vol. 10599 LNCS(2017)p. 309-326

Paper in proceeding

PRECIS: Privacy and security in wearable computing devices

Swedish Research Council (VR) (2014-4845), 2015-01-01 -- 2018-12-31.

Subject Categories

Computer Engineering

Other Computer and Information Science

Computer Science

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Publisher

Chalmers

Room ES53, EDIT Building, Maskingränd 2, Chalmers

Opponent: Paul Stankovski, Electrical and Information Technology, Lund University, Sweden

More information

Latest update

11/27/2018