Podcast: Making cryptography accessible, efficient, and scalable

Episode 005 | September 08, 2020

Ensuring security and privacy of data, both personal and institutional, is of paramount importance in today’s world where data itself is a highly precious commodity. Cryptography is a complex and specialized subject that not many people are familiar with, and developing and implementing cryptographic and security protocols such as Secure Multi-party Computation can be difficult and also add a lot of overhead to computational processes. But researchers at Microsoft Research have now been able to develop cryptographic protocols that are developer-friendly, efficient and that work at scale with acceptable impact on performance. Join us as we talk to Dr. Divya Gupta and Dr. Rahul Sharma about their work in making cryptography easy to use and deploy.

Dr. Divya Gupta is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Lab. Her primary research interests are cryptography and security. Currently, she is working on secure machine learning, using secure multi-party computation (MPC), and lightweight blockchains. Earlier she received her B.Tech and M.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Delhi and PhD in Computer Science from University of California at Los Angeles where she worked on secure computation, coding theory and program obfuscation.

Dr. Rahul Sharma is a senior researcher in Microsoft Research Lab India since 2016. His research lies in the intersection of Machine Learning (ML) and Programming Languages (PL), which can be classified into the two broad themes of “ML for PL” and “PL for ML”. In the former, he has used ML to improve reliability and efficiency of software. Whereas, in the latter, he has built compilers to run ML on exotic hardware like tiny IoT devices and cryptographic protocols. Rahul holds a B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Delhi and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Show notes and transcript: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/lab/microsoft-research-india/articles/podcast-making-cryptography-accessible-efficient-and-scalable-with-dr-divya-gupta-and-dr-rahul-sharma/

For more information on Microsoft Research’s work in Secure Multi-party Computation: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/ezpc-easy-secure-multi-party-computation/

GitHub page for the project: https://github.com/mpc-msri/EzPC

See more Microsoft Research India podcast episodes and learn about the research: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/lab/microsoft-research-india/