The Centre for Doctoral Training in Cyber Security for the Everyday seeks to recruit a PhD student to work on practical privacy-preserving outsourced computation techniques, such as homomorphic encryption (HE). This project will be carried out jointly with KDDI Research, Japan.
Fully homomorphic encryption enables the evaluation of arbitrary functions on encrypted data, without requiring access to the secret key. This cryptographic primitive can enable a variety of practical applications in secure outsourced computation, including privacy-preserving data analysis.
Cybersecurity systems (e.g., IDS, IPS) collect large amounts of data to detect security events. Analysis of this data may however pose a significant threat to the privacy of users. A privacy-preserving data analysis attempts to alleviate this threat by carrying out the analysis over encrypted data. Removing privacy risks will allow more data sharing, and more enhanced data analysis.
The goal of the project is the enhancement of HE for practical use. This could include (for example) the design and security of practical privacy-preserving applications, or proposing improvements and optimisations to existing HE schemes.
The Information Security Group (ISG) at Royal Holloway has a strong track record in cryptographic research, including algorithm design and analysis, post-quantum cryptography, homomorphic encryption and applications of secure computation. KDDI Research is the research and innovation arm of KDDI Corporation, one of the largest Japanese telecommunications operators. The ISG and KDDI have a long-term collaboration in the area of cryptography, and the student recruited for this project will work closely with researchers from the two groups.
Applicants are expected to have a background in mathematics, computer science, or a related discipline. Prospective applicants are welcome to contact Dr Rachel Player to discuss the project.
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