Prof. Robert Deng

IEEE Fellow

Singapore Management University

Biography: Robert Deng is AXA Chair Professor of Cybersecurity, Director of the Secure Mobile Centre, and Deputy Dean for Faculty & Research, School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University (SMU). His research interests are in the areas of data security and privacy, network security, and applied cryptography. He received the Outstanding University Researcher Award from National University of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew Fellowship for Research Excellence from SMU, and Asia-Pacific Information Security Leadership Achievements Community Service Star from International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium. He is a Fellow of IEEE and Fellow of Academy of Engineering Singapore.

Speech Title: Towards Practical Multiuser Searchable Encryption - Applications, Attacks, and Countermeasures     

Abstract: The volume of data stored in the public cloud is growing exponentially. With this growth, the risk of data breaches and the challenges of data protection grow just as rapidly. As more organizations opt for using encryption to protect their data in the cloud and in web services, the ability to efficiently search over encrypted data becomes increasingly important.

Though numerous searchable encryption (SE) schemes have appeared in the literature, Efficiently Deployable & Efficiently Searchable Encryption (EDESE) is the most popular SE scheme being deployed in practical applications at the expense of information leakages that were considered acceptable. In this talk, we first look at single user EDESE and multiuser EDESE schemes and their real-world deployments. We then review some of the recent attacks to EDESE that can recover the underlying keywords of query tokens. Finally, we show the design and implementation of our cloud data security platform that employs multiuser EDESE and our countermeasure to mitigate attacks to EDESE.