Speaker: Yael Tauman Kalai (Microsoft Research New England, Cambridge, MA.)

Title: Cryptography Resilient to Physical Attacks

Abstract: Traditionally, cryptographers assume that the secret keys are completely hidden from the adversary, and that the cryptographic algorithms are error-free. However, in reality there are various real-world physical attacks which adversaries use to break cryptographic systems. These include timing, power, and acoustic attacks, which allow an adversary to (continually) leak information about the secret keys, as well as various tampering attacks, such as heat and EM radiation attacks, which allow an adversary to (continually) tamper with system.

Recently, there has been a vast and growing body of work, which try to secure cryptographic systems against such physical attacks. In this talk I will explain some of these results.

Bio: Yael Tauman Kalai received her BA (1997) from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, MA (2001) under the supervision of Adi Shamir at the Weizmann Institute, and PhD (2006) under the supervision of Shafi Goldwasser at MIT. After postdoctoral positions at Microsoft Research and the Weizmann Institute, she is now a Researcher at Microsoft Research New England. Her honors include an outstanding master's thesis prize, a Sprowl's award (cowinner) for best PhD Thesis at MIT. Her research focuses on cryptography.

Speaker: Adam Tauman Kalai (Microsoft Research New England, Cambridge, MA.)

Title: Common Ground in Coding: Compression with Differing Priors

Abstract: Digital compression schemes rely upon perfect synchronization between compression and decompression algorithms. In order to take advantage of a good prior distribution over messages (so likely messages can be shorter), both parties must agree on the same prior distribution. Human communication is much more robust, e.g., it generally suffices for the author of an article to know roughly who the target audience is in order to be understood. We use ideas based on principles from human communication to design codes that can capture prior knowledge of the distribution over messages, but where the two parties can have differing prior distributions. In this sense, the compression scheme more closely resmembles human communication and we are performing "biomimicry."

Joint work with Brendan Juba, Sanjeev Khanna, and Madhu Sudan.

Bio: Adam Tauman Kalai received his BA (1996) from Harvard, and MA (1998) and PhD (2001) under the supervision of Avrim Blum from CMU. After an NSF postdoctoral fellowship at M.I.T. with Santosh Vempala, he served as an assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago and then at Georgia Tech. He is now a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research New England. His honors include an NSF CAREER award, and an Alfred P. Sloan fellowship. His research focuses on computational learning theory, human computation, and algorithms.