The absolute privacy of secrets has been the corner-stone of modern
cryptography. Still, in practice, secrets do get compromised at
times for a variety of reasons. A particularly disturbing loss of
secrecy is as a result of *side-channel attacks* which exploit the
fact that every cryptographic algorithm is ultimately implemented on
a physical device and such implementations enable various types of
"physical observations". These observations leak information beyond
what can be obtained from black-box access to the device, and have
lead to complete breaks of many practical cryptographic schemes.
 Traditionally, such attacks have been followed by ad-hoc "fixes"
which make particular implementations invulnerable to particular
attacks, only to potentially be broken by new side-channel attacks.

In this talk, I will describe some recent work on modeling
*general*  classes of side-channel attacks, and designing
cryptographic schemes  secure against these attacks. In particular, I
will show how to  construct two fundamental cryptographic objects --
namely public-key  encryption schemes and digital signature schemes
that are secure  against *general* side-channel attacks.

I will also describe a method of protecting *any* computation
(including, as a special case, public-key encryption and digital
signatures, but encompassing much more) against *specific* classes
of side-channel attacks.

Bio:
Vinod Vaikuntanathan is a postdoctoral fellow in the cryptography
group at IBM T.J. Watson. He received a Ph.D. from MIT in 2008
under the guidance of Shafi Goldwasser. He is a recipient of the MIT
Akamai graduate fellowship, the IBM Josef Raviv Postdoctoral
fellowship and the MIT George M. Sprowls Ph.D. thesis award. His research focuses
on the dual goals of building new mathematical foundations for
cryptography, as well as securing cryptography against physical
attacks.