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DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20260713T090000
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DTSTAMP:20260726T182336Z
SUMMARY:Wenhao Zhang CS PhD Prospectus: Hardware Co-Design Approach for Modern Cryptography
UID:643167@northwestern.edu
TZID:America/Chicago
DESCRIPTION:Modern cryptography\, including multi-party computation\, zero-knowledge  proofs and fully homomorphic encryption\, offers provable privacy for  computations over sensitive data and enables a new generation of  applications. Applications span from privacy-preserving machine  learning and secure financial analytics to privacy-respecting  decentralized systems. Despite decades of progress\, a persistent gap  remains between the theoretical efficiency of these protocols and the  performance demands of real-world deployments. This gap arises from a  disconnect between hardware-agnostic protocol design and how modern  hardware actually operates. Asymptotically optimal protocols routinely  rely on primitives that hardware executes slowly\, and even hardware aware protocols perform poorly when implementations ignore instruction  pipelines\, memory hierarchy\, and vector units. My work is motivated by  a core goal: to build secure computation primitives and systems that  are provably secure while remaining concretely practical on real  hardware.  In this talk\, I will summarize my prior work spanning pseudorandom  correlation generators\, garbled circuits\, RAM-based MPC\, oblivious  RAM\, threshold FHE\, and anonymous messaging. I will focus on three  examples of the co-design philosophy at the primitive level: a  maliciously secure distributed point function that closes the semi honest–active gap at 50× less communication; a mixed-mode oblivious  RAM that allows public accesses and shaves the log factor and concrete  overheads for these operations\, while matching the fully-private lower  bound; and a concretely efficient succinct garbling scheme that turns  rate-one garbled circuits from a theoretical curiosity into a  deployable tool. I will then present the forward-looking direction for  my ongoing and future research: extending the co-design methodology  from the CPU down to specialized accelerators\, targeting large-scale  FHE workloads.\n\nWebcast Link: https://northwestern.zoom.us/my/wenhaozhang
LOCATION:Online
TRANSP:OPAQUE
URL:https://planitpurple.northwestern.edu/event/643167
CREATED:20260706T050000Z
STATUS:CONFIRMED
LAST-MODIFIED:20260706T050000Z
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