分野別セミナー

Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and other companies have invested heavily in social networks, in cloud computing, and in cloud storage. They depict a great new world in which local in person contacts/friends are being replaced by global virtual ones, local storage of data is being replaced by cloud storage, and so forth. The US government and presidents/provosts of numerous universities have been lured into switching to the use of the cloud.


First, one can wonder how secure these cloud servers are. Second, even though a lot of fundamental/theoretical research on cloud security is extremely exciting, there is no motivation for social networks, cloud storage and cloud computing corporations to implement and incorporate the results. Moreover, in countries such as Japan and the USA, lobbyists dominate the government and Europe's regulation (such as the need to authorise the use of cookies) is ineffective.
We start this lecture by explaining the rise of cloud storage, cloud computing and social networks as a consequence of a failure in the design of adequate OS (operating systems). We survey some of the solutions proposed to address security problems. Some of these solutions are user-developed ones, which do not require the cooperation of the companies, and might therefore have a better chance of success.

Theoreticians have been pushing the use of secure multiparty computation (MPC) to address the problem of outsourcing computation in a secure way. A major part of this presentation is focused on analyzing whether MPC is the correct technique for this problem. We identify several problems that have been overlooked in the context of the secure outsourcing of computation.