Towards Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Application Intelligence

Speaker: Sherman S. M. Chow (Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)

Abstract: Application intelligence gathers metadata of applications to benefit the applications in security and performance, e.g., sanitizing malicious content, managing multi-source data for efficient retrieval, or collaboratively filtering redundant information. One might envision an extended notion in which the application users contribute information useful for application intelligence beyond metadata, perhaps motivated by earning in-application credits in the form of cryptocurrency.

This talk quickly overviews some interesting results in cryptography (Financial Crypt. '15, IEEE ICDCS '21, IEEE S&P '21, Usenix Security '22) that can contribute to privacy-preserving application intelligence, ideally in a decentralized setting, to reduce the trust assumption over many potentially compromised or colluding users.

Bio: Sherman Chow is an Associate Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong. He received the Early Career Award 2013/14 from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. He was a research fellow at the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo, Canada, a position he commenced after receiving his Ph.D. degree from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, United States. His main interests are Cryptography, Security, and Privacy, with publications in AsiaCrypt, CCS, EuroCrypt, ITCS, NDSS, S&P, and Usenix Security.