Unclonable Polymers and Their Cryptographic Applications
Unclonable Polymers and Their Cryptographic Applications
We propose a mechanism for generating and manipulating protein polymers to obtain a new type of consumable storage that exhibits intriguing cryptographic “self-destruct” properties, assuming the hardness of certain polymer-sequencing problems.
To demonstrate the cryptographic potential of this technology, we first develop a formalism that captures (in a minimalistic way) the functionality and security properties provided by the technology. Next, using this technology, we construct and prove security of two cryptographic applications that are currently obtainable only via trusted hardware that implements logical circuitry (either classical or quantum). The first application is a password-controlled secure vault where the stored data is irrecoverably erased once a threshold of unsuccessful access attempts is reached. The second is (a somewhat relaxed version of) one-time programs, namely a device that allows evaluating a secret function only a limited number of times before self-destructing, where each evaluation is made on a fresh user-chosen input.
Finally, while our constructions, modeling, and analysis are designed to capture the proposed polymer-based technology, they are sufficiently general to be of potential independent interest.
Based on a join work with Ran Canetti, Yaniv Erlich, Jonathan Gershoni. Tal Malkin, Itsik Pe’er, Anna Roitburd-Berman, and Eran Tromer (appeared in Eurocrypt 2022)
Link to presentation slides: https://ghadaalmashaqbeh.github.io/slides/ediblecrypto-ext.pdf
About the speaker
Assistant Professor, University of Connecticut
Ghada Almashaqbeh is an assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Connecticut. Her research spans cryptography, privacy, and systems security with a large focus on blockchains and their applications, and it is supported by NSF, Protocol Labs, and UConn Research Excellence Award. Ghada received her PhD from Columbia in 2019. Before joining UConn, she spent a while exploring the entrepreneurship world; she cofounded CacheCash, a startup that came out of her PhD thesis, and was a cryptographer at NuCypher. Ghada is an affiliated member at the Connecticut Advanced Computing Center (CACC) and the Engineering for Human Rights Initiative at UConn, a scientific advisor for Sunscreen Tech and The Melon, and a 2023 Foresight Institute Fellow.
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