Hong-Sheng Zhou, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, has received a 2018 Google Faculty Research Award. Each proposal for this highly competitive award goes through a rigorous Google-wide review process, and only 15 percent of applicants receive funding. Google established this award to identify and strengthen long-term collaborative relationships with faculty working on problems that will impact how future generations use technology. These awards are structured as seed funding to support exceptionally innovative work by top researchers in world-class universities. 

Zhou’s research project, titled “Secure Computation against Kleptographic Attacks,” was selected from a large pool of proposals. The goal of this project is to investigate how to carry out secure multi-party computation in the presence of very strong but realistic attacks in which the adversaries are capable of entering a computer and modifying the user’s protocol codes without being detected. The study defines a novel simulation-based security model for capturing kleptographic attacks in interactive protocols and analyzes the feasibility of constructions in the model.

“Kleptography is the study of stealing information subliminally from software/hardware implementations. Security and privacy can be lost on a very large scale, even when traditional cryptography is in place, if kleptography is not taken into consideration,” Zhou said. “My project has an ambitious goal to defend against these attacks, and eventually help people to regain their right to freedom and privacy.”