Talk @ INESC-ID with Bernardo Ferreira “Confidential distributed systems: encryption is only the beginning!”
On 12 June, Bernardo Ferreira, from the Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon, will present a talk titled “Confidential distributed systems: encryption is only the beginning!”, which will explore how Byzantine‑resilient distributed systems still fail to ensure confidentiality and why practical secure systems must go beyond encryption to address key management, secure computation, and protection against data‑leakage attacks.
Date & Time: 12 June, 11h00
Location: Room 9 (ground floor), INESC-ID
Abstract: Classical distributed systems aim at increasing the availability and fault-tolerance of services and applications, but ignore the danger of cyber-attacks and malicious intrusions. Byzantine fault tolerant replication (BFT SMR) can protect distributed systems from these threats, but still only safeguards their availability and integrity, disregarding confidentiality as a concern. Indeed, even though BFT SMR can tolerate a fraction of maliciously corrupted replicas, a single corruption is enough to expose data privacy and break the confidentiality of the system. Traditional approaches to ensure confidentiality, such as data encryption, can be employed to mitigate this problem but may not be enough, as there is still the issue of how to manage cryptographic keys, perform secure computations, and protect against leakage-abusage and file-injection attacks. In this talk I will present recent research results of my team in confidential distributed systems and why encryption is only the beginning when trying to build practical distributed systems that provide availability, integrity, and confidentiality guarantees.
Bio: Bernardo Ferreira is an Assistant Professor with the Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon, and an integrated researcher with the LASIGE research unit. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Faculty of Sciences and Technology, Nova University of Lisbon (2016). His research interests include distributed systems security and privacy, with special focus on applied cryptography, blockchains, and secure distributed computation.
About INESC-ID
INESC-ID, “Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores: Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa” is a Research and Development and Innovation Organization (R&D+i) in the fields of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering. INESC-ID mission is to produce added value to people and society, supporting the response of public policies to scientific, health, environmental, cultural, social, economic and political challenges. INESC-ID promotes cooperation between academia and industry by addressing research on daily life issues, such as healthcare, space, mobility, agri-food, industry 4.0, and smart grids. This high level of knowledge transfer is achieved through both competitive research projects and direct contracted research. Public and private entities have therefore access to a pool of knowledge, resources and services provided through the unique competencies available at the institution.
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