HIPS

Until now, research in efficient cryptographic protocols has typically been in two different directions. The first direction, and the major one, is to construct more efficient protocols and prove them secure, where efficiency is measured by the amount of communication sent, the number of heavy cryptographic operations carried out (e.g., exponentiations), and so on. The second direction is to take the state-of-the-art protocols and implement them while optimising the implementation based on systems concerns. This latter direction has proven to improve the efficiency of existing protocols significantly, but is limited since it remains within the constraints of existing cryptographic approaches.

We propose a synergetic approach towards achieving high-performance secure computation. We will design new protocols while combining research from cryptography, algorithms and systems. In this way, issues like load balancing, memory management, cache-awareness, bandwidth bottlenecks, utilisation of parallel computing resources, and more, will be built into the cryptographic protocol and not considered merely as an afterthought. If successful, HIPS will enable the application of the beautiful theory of secure computation to the problems of privacy in the digital era, cloud security and more."