Special Topics on Privacy and Public Auditability — Event 7

STPPA7 Schedule:

• 12:00: STPPA#7 Welcome and Introduction. Luís Brandão (FGR Contractor @ NIST/Strativia, USA) [Slides]
• 12:15: Timelock Encryption: an Overview and Retrospective. Kelsey Melissaris (Aarhus University, Denmark), Yolan Romailler (Randamu, USA and Switzerland). [Slides]
• 13:00: Witness Encryption: Theory and Practice. Sanjam Garg (UC Berkeley, USA). [Slides]
• 13:45: Break
• 14:30: The Multiple Faces of Deniability. Rafail Ostrovsky (UCLA, USA). [Slides]
• 15:15: Panel Conversation. PEC team and all the speakers. [Slide]
• 16:00+: End

Times displayed in EST = UTC-5 (EST = Eastern Standard Time; UTC = Coordinated Universal Time)

Abbreviated bios of the invited speakers:

(Based on text provided by the speakers/panelists, with possible adaptations/abbreviations for conciseness and consistency; see possible links for extended bios)

• Sanjam Garg is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests are in cryptography and its applications to security and privacy. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2013 and his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 2008. Prof. Garg is the recipient of various honors such as the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, the Sloan Research Fellowship and the IIT Delhi Graduates of the Last Decade Award. Prof. Garg's research has been recognized with a test of time award at FOCS 2023, and best paper awards at EUROCRYPT 2013, CRYPTO 2017 and EUROCRYPT 2018.
• Kelsey Melissaris is a postdoctoral researcher in Aarhus University’s Cryptography and Security Group. Her postdoctoral research is focused on digital signatures and threshold cryptography. Kelsey received her Ph.D. from the City University of New York in 2022 and wrote her thesis on authenticated key exchange.
• Rafail Ostrovsky is the Chair in Knowledge Sciences at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. He is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at UCLA, and is serving on the editorial boards of Journal of ACM, Algorithmica Journal, and Journal of Cryptology. He is a Fellow of the NAI, AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and IACR, and foreign member of Academia Europaea. He has 350+ refereed publications and 15 issued USPTO patents. He chaired the IEEE TC on Mathematical Foundations of Computing (2015–2018), chaired the FOCS 2011 PC, and served on 40+ international conference PC's. He earned multiple honors, including the Henry Taub Prize (1993), the RSA prize (2018), and two distinguished awards from IEEE Computer Society (2017, 2022).
• Yolan Romailler is an applied cryptographer at Randamu delving into (and dwelling on) cryptography, secure coding, and other fun things. He has previously spoken at Black Hat USA, Real World Crypto and DEF CON on topics including automation in cryptography research, functional encryption, distributed randomness, and more! He notably introduced the first practical fault attack against the EdDSA signature scheme. Nowadays he's working on threshold cryptography, including Verifiable Random Functions (VRFs), Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs), distributed key generation, and timelock encryption.

Organization: The STPPA series is hosted by the NIST Privacy-Enhancing Cryptography (PEC) project. The PEC team (Luís Brandão, Angela Robinson, René Peralta) and all speakers (mentioned above) participated in the panel conversation. Angela Robinson introduced two talks/speakers. The STPPA7 event was organized by Luís Brandão, who also opened the event and introduced one talk/speaker. The virtual event (webinar) received around 215 registrations, of which around 115 attended at least 30 minutes, and around 90 attended more than 90 minutes.