學院消息

Title: Preserving Confidentiality of Sensitive Information When Using Public Cloud Infrastructure

Speaker: Parmesh Ramanathan, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA

Time: 2019/3/20 (Wed) 10：00 - 12：00

Location: EC 329

Abstract:

There is growing interest in solving computationally expensive problems using public cloud infrastructure. Such infrastructure provides customers instant and affordable access to powerful computational resources to match their peak computing demands while providing the needed elasticity to stop paying for these resources when the demands are over. However, cloud computing requires a customer to send problem instances containing confidential design information to untrusted entity with significant potential for leakage of sensitive information. For the past few years, my research group has been developing obfuscation techniques to hide all the sensitive information in a problem instance and solve the obfuscated problem using the computational resources in the cloud without revealing any of the sensitive information to the cloud infrastructure. For many applications, we have shown that this can be achieved without significantly increasing the computational complexity of the original privacy-agnostic solution to the problem.

In this talk, I will illustrate our solution approach for two applications, smart electric grid and genomic sequencing. For smart electric grids, I will show how one can solve a multi-party optimal power flow problem without revealing each party’s sensitive grid information such as network topology, generator capacities, line limits, and anticipated loads. Similarly, for the genomic sequencing application, I will show how can solve the sequence alignment problem in a cloud without revealing sensitive information such as Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) which are critical for preserving an individual’s privacy. I will also present a brief overview of our solutions for other applications including electronic design automation and digital circuit simulation with Intellectual Property (IP) cores.

Bio:

Parmesh Ramanathan is an Associate Dean in the Graduate School and a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He received his Masters and Ph.D. degrees from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA in 1986 and 1989, respectively. Prior to that, he received his B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 1984. Since 1989, he has been a faculty member at University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he also served as the Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2005—2009. He is Fellow of Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers (IEEE). In addition to privacy, his research over the past 30 years have spanned the areas of real-time computing, fault-tolerance, wireless and sensor networks, and more recently bioinformatics.