SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENT
              CENTER FOR SECURE INFORMATION SYSTEMS
                     GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY
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              Date :  Thursday, April 12, 2012
              Time :  11:00 - 12:00
          Location :  Research Hall, Room 401
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Scalable and Owner-centric Secure Data Sharing in Cloud Computing

Professor Wenjing Lou
Department of Computer Science
Virginia Tech  

Cloud Computing is the long dreamed vision of computing as a utility
and has recently emerged as a new IT infrastructure. In cloud
computing, databases and applications are moved into the servers in
the large data centers on the Internet (i.e. the cloud). External
users can enjoy massively scalable and elastic data, software, and
hardware capabilities as a service using Internet technology.

As more and more information of individuals and companies is placed in
the cloud, data security and privacy becomes a critical concern. In
particular, secure data storage and sharing presents a unique
challenge. Traditional data access control places full trust on the
server and relies on the server to enforce the access
policies. However, in cloud computing, the cloud servers are not fully
trustworthy from users' perspective and users would not want the
servers to learn the sensitive information of theirs.

In this talk, we discuss the unique challenge of secure data storage
and sharing problem in cloud computing. We study the problem under a
challenging multi-owner, multi-user, and semi-trusted server
setting. We present a novel encryption-based, owner-centric, and
fine-grained data storage and sharing framework. Our solution exploits
advanced cryptographic techniques, including attribute based
encryption (ABE), proxy re-encryption, and lazy re-encryption, to help
owners to achieve secure data storage and sharing, when cloud servers
are not in the same trust domain as the data owners. We address issues
such as fine-grained access control policy enforcement, effective and
efficient data sharing strategies, system scalability, user
management, as well as computation delegation which is in response to
resource-constrained end user devices, under the proposed general
framework.

We will also talk briefly on two other data security and privacy
problems --- public integrity verification/auditing of outsourced
cloud data, and privacy-preserving search over encrypted cloud data.

Bio:

Wenjing Lou is an associate professor in the Computer Science
department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and
a co-director of the Complex Networks and Security Research (CNSR)
lab. Prior to joining Virginia Tech in 2011, she was on the faculty of
Worcester Polytechnic Institute from 2003 to 2011.

She received a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from
University of Florida. She received a B.S. and an M.S. in Computer
Science and Engineering from Xi'an Jiaotong University.

She was named Joseph Samuel Satin Distinguished fellow in 2006 by
WPI. She was a recipient of the U.S. National Science Foundation
Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award in 2008. She received
the Sigma Xi Junior Faculty Research Award at WPI in 2009.
Differentially Private Histogram Publication

**Point of contact:  Prof Sushil Jajodia [log in to unmask]
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