Seny Kamara | |
---|---|
Born | France |
Nationality | French, American |
Alma mater | |
Known for | searchable symmetric encryption, structured encryption |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Computer science, cryptography |
Institutions | |
Doctoral advisor | Fabian Monrose |
Seny Kamara is a Senegalese-French-American computer scientist best known for his work on cryptography. He has delivered multiple congressional testimonies about the potential harms and opportunities with technology. He leads or co-leads numerous centers and activities focused on cryptography and social good. His work has been covered extensively in high-profile media, including Wired and Forbes.
This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(May 2022) |
Kamara received his Bachelors in Computer Science from Purdue University in 2001. He received his Master's degree and PhD in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University in 2008. His dissertation, Computing Securely with Untrusted Resources, explored cryptographic problems in the setting of cloud computing including searchable symmetric encryption and proofs of storage.
He is an associate professor of computer science at Brown University. He has worked as a chief scientist at Aroki Systems, as a principal scientist at MongoDB, and as a researcher at Microsoft Research. At Brown University, he co-directs the Encrypted Systems Lab and is affiliated with the CAPS group, the Data Science Initiative, the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies and the Policy Lab. He teaches a popular Algorithms for the People course that surveys, critiques, and aspires to address the ways in which computer science & technology affect marginalized communities. [1]
Kamara is one of the principal contributors to the field of encrypted search and to searchable symmetric encryption (SSE). With Reza Curtmola, Juan Garay and Rafail Ostrovsky, he proposed the first SSE constructions to achieve optimal search time. [2] Along with Melissa Chase, he later introduced structured encryption [3] which underlies most practical SSE and encrypted database schemes.
Kamara has given congressional testimony to the U.S. House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology in 2021 where he argued for considering the harms technology can cause and advocated for computer science and technology communities to work hard to mitigate those harms. [4] Also in 2021, he collaborated with Senator Ron Wyden to advocate for an encrypted gun registry. [5] In 2019, he delivered congressional testimony to the Financial Services Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives about how data uses in the financial industry have the potential to erode consumer privacy and increase discrimination. [6] He joined a National Academy of Sciences committee focused on "Law Enforcement and Intelligence Access to Plaintext Information in an Era of Widespread Strong Encryption: Options and Tradeoffs" which has produced a report on encryption and cybersecurity. [7]
His most cited publications are:
In cryptography, key size or key length refers to the number of bits in a key used by a cryptographic algorithm.
In cryptography, encryption is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext. Despite its goal, encryption does not itself prevent interference but denies the intelligible content to a would-be interceptor.
Public-key cryptography, or asymmetric cryptography, is the field of cryptographic systems that use pairs of related keys. Each key pair consists of a public key and a corresponding private key. Key pairs are generated with cryptographic algorithms based on mathematical problems termed one-way functions. Security of public-key cryptography depends on keeping the private key secret; the public key can be openly distributed without compromising security.
In cryptography, a brute-force attack consists of an attacker submitting many passwords or passphrases with the hope of eventually guessing correctly. The attacker systematically checks all possible passwords and passphrases until the correct one is found. Alternatively, the attacker can attempt to guess the key which is typically created from the password using a key derivation function. This is known as an exhaustive key search. This approach doesn't depend on intellectual tactics; rather, it relies on making several attempts.
Ronald Linn Rivest is a cryptographer and computer scientist whose work has spanned the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity. He is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
In cryptography and steganography, plausibly deniable encryption describes encryption techniques where the existence of an encrypted file or message is deniable in the sense that an adversary cannot prove that the plaintext data exists.
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Encryption software is software that uses cryptography to prevent unauthorized access to digital information. Cryptography is used to protect digital information on computers as well as the digital information that is sent to other computers over the Internet.
A deterministic encryption scheme is a cryptosystem which always produces the same ciphertext for a given plaintext and key, even over separate executions of the encryption algorithm. Examples of deterministic encryption algorithms include RSA cryptosystem, and many block ciphers when used in ECB mode or with a constant initialization vector.
Dan Boneh is an Israeli–American professor in applied cryptography and computer security at Stanford University.
Rafail Ostrovsky is a distinguished professor of computer science and mathematics at UCLA and a well-known researcher in algorithms and cryptography.
In cryptography, a hybrid cryptosystem is one which combines the convenience of a public-key cryptosystem with the efficiency of a symmetric-key cryptosystem. Public-key cryptosystems are convenient in that they do not require the sender and receiver to share a common secret in order to communicate securely. However, they often rely on complicated mathematical computations and are thus generally much more inefficient than comparable symmetric-key cryptosystems. In many applications, the high cost of encrypting long messages in a public-key cryptosystem can be prohibitive. This is addressed by hybrid systems by using a combination of both.
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Amit Sahai is an Indian-American computer scientist. He is a professor of computer science at UCLA and the director of the Center for Encrypted Functionalities.
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Private set intersection is a secure multiparty computation cryptographic technique that allows two parties holding sets to compare encrypted versions of these sets in order to compute the intersection. In this scenario, neither party reveals anything to the counterparty except for the elements in the intersection.
Searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) is a form of encryption that allows one to efficiently search over a collection of encrypted documents or files without the ability to decrypt them. SSE can be used to outsource files to an untrusted cloud storage server without ever revealing the files in the clear but while preserving the server's ability to search over them.
Hugo Krawczyk is an Argentine-Israeli cryptographer best known for co-inventing the HMAC message authentication algorithm and contributing in fundamental ways to the cryptographic architecture of central Internet standards, including IPsec, IKE, and SSL/TLS. In particular, both IKEv2 and TLS 1.3 use Krawczyk’s SIGMA protocol as the cryptographic core of their key exchange procedures. He has also contributed foundational work in the areas of threshold and proactive cryptosystems and searchable symmetric encryption, among others.
Structured encryption (STE) is a form of encryption that encrypts a data structure so that it can be privately queried. Structured encryption can be used as a building block to design end-to-end encrypted databases, efficient searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) and other algorithms that can be efficiently executed on encrypted data.