Position:  Postdoctoral Researcher

Current Institution:  Microsoft Research

Abstract:  Integrity and Privacy in the Cloud: Efficient Algorithms for Secure and Privacy-Preserving Computing on Outsourced Data

An integral component of the modern computing era is the ability to outsource data and computation to remote cloud service providers or CSPs.  The advent of cloud services, however, raises important challenges of in terms of integrity and privacy of data and computation. As soon as users delegate computation to cloud platforms (such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS), concerns related to integrity and privacy of the data arise. Moreover, in the face of an alarming number of data breaches and massive surveillance programs around the globe, the privacy of outsourced data is becoming more important than ever. My research focuses on designing efficient privacy-preserving and verifiable mechanisms to outsource data processing and computation along with prototype implementation and experimental validation. In particular, I have been focusing on the following setting:  how can a trusted data owner outsource her (possibly encrypted) data to an untrusted server such that the server will not be able to cheat while answering queries on the stored data. My work falls under the following broader areas:  secure two-party computation, encrypted search, and zero-knowledge verifiable computation.

Bio:
Esha Ghosh is a postdoctoral researcher in the Cryptography Group at Microsoft Research Redmond. She graduated from Brown University in May 2018. Esha was the winner of a Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant (2017-2018). During her PhD, she also won the Paris C. Kanellakis Fellowship at Brown University and the best student paper award at the International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security. Prior to joining Brown, Esha finished her Masters degree at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in India.