Nirvan
Tyagi
Ph.D.
Candidate, Cornell University
ECE Faculty
Candidate Seminar
Tuesday, March
28, 2023, 10:00-11:00am
B02 CSL and Via Zoom
Title: Privacy-Preserving Accountability
Online
Abstract: Technologies that enable confidential
communication and anonymous authentication are important for improving privacy
for users of internet services. Unfortunately, encryption and anonymity, while
good for privacy, make it hard to hold bad actors accountable for misbehavior.
Internet services rely on seeing message content to detect spam and other
harmful content; services must also be able to identify users to attribute and
respond to abuse complaints. This tension between privacy and accountability
leads to one of two suboptimal outcomes: Services require excessive trust in
centralized entities to hold users accountable for misbehavior, or services
leave themselves and/or their users open to abuse.
In this talk, I will highlight two deployed applications, end-to-end encrypted messaging and anonymous web browsing, where this tension arises and how gaps in accountability can and do lead to real-world attacks. I will discuss how I have addressed this tension through the design of new cryptographic protocols that preserve user privacy while also providing mechanisms for holding bad actors accountable. In particular, I will cover new protocols for anonymous blocklisting, one-time-use credentials, and transparent key infrastructure.
Nirvan Tyagi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department
of Computer Science at Cornell University, advised by Tom Ristenpart and based
at the NYC Cornell Tech campus. Over the past two years, he has held visiting
student appointments at University of Washington and Stanford. His research
interests span broadly across computer security, applied cryptography, and
systems. Most recently, his focus has been on building systems that provide
strong user privacy while also providing appropriate accountability against
misbehavior. He is the recipient of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, a
Facebook Ph.D. Fellowship, and a Digital Life Initiative Doctoral Fellowship.
Nirvan received an Early Career Award at CRYPTO 2020 and his work on
one-time-use credentials is being standardized by the IETF.
