Author: Rob Matheson | MIT News Office<\/p>\n
As a boy growing up in a small South Indian village, Vinod Vaikuntanathan taught himself calculus by reading books his grandfather left lying around the house. Years later in college, he toiled away in the library studying number theory, which deals with the properties and relationships of numbers, primarily positive integers.<\/p>\n
This field of study naturally steered Vaikuntanathan toward what he calls \u201cthe most important application of number theory in the modern world\u201d: cryptography.<\/p>\n
Today, Vaikuntanathan, a recently tenured associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, is using number theory and other mathematical concepts to fortify encryption so it can be used for new applications and stand up to even the toughest adversaries.<\/p>\n
One major focus is developing more efficient encryption techniques that can be scaled to do complex computations on large datasets. That means multiple parties can share data while ensuring the data remains private. For example, if researchers could analyze genomic data and patient data together, they may be able to identify key genome sequences associated with diseases. But the information for genomes and patients is kept private by separate entities, so collaboration is difficult. That\u2019s a gap Vaikuntanathan wants to close.<\/p>\n
\u201cData is available everywhere for these purposes, but it lives in silos. Better encryption is a way to ensure privacy yet allow the person holding the encrypted object to get something useful out of it,\u201d Vaikuntanathan says. \u201cEncrypting data and using data for a valuable purpose don\u2019t have to be opposing constraints. You can achieve the best of both worlds sometimes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Part of his work also means \u201cfuture-proofing\u201d cryptography in a world that may soon see the rise of ultrafast quantum computers. Still in their infancy, quantum computers could one day provide breakthroughs in materials science, drug discovery, and artificial intelligence, to name just a few fields. But, because of their incredible speeds, they could also be used to break through most, if not all, today\u2019s toughest cryptography schemes.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll the existing encryption systems you use over the internet are insecure if you can build quantum computers,\u201d Vaikuntanathan says. \u201cThis is something that everyone knows at this point. We need to develop other ways of doing cryptography to secure the internet so it stands strong, even in the face of quantum computers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Step by step<\/strong><\/p>\n Vaikuntanathan\u2019s journey to cryptography, and to MIT, was a step-by-step process of following his academic interests to increasingly larger cities and institutes \u2014\u00a0and teaching himself along the way.<\/p>\n It started in Neyyattinkara, India, a place so small \u201cyou\u2019d find it hard to locate on map,\u201d Vaikuntanathan says. Today, he and his wife still disagree over whether to call it a town or village. But he\u2019s adamant on the latter: \u201cIt doesn\u2019t even have a shopping mall \u2014 that\u2019s my criteria for calling it a village.\u201d<\/p>\n By age 12, using his grandfather\u2019s old texts, Vaikuntanathan had taught himself an admittedly incomplete understanding of calculus. \u201cIt was buggy and error-prone, but as you go along you get better teachers. The best thing one can do is teach oneself these notions, struggle at it \u2014\u00a0you\u2019ll get it wrong \u2014\u00a0and then later be enlightened,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n After attending his area\u2019s only high school, Vaikuntanathan, at 15, joined a pre-university program at a technical institute in a nearby bigger city, Trivandrum, about 20 miles away, where he met like-minded classmates. \u201cThere weren\u2019t many people who cared about math and science,\u201d he says, \u201cbut a few of us banded together and learned advanced math by ourselves.\u201d Of course, there were some disadvantages: \u201cTwenty miles takes an hour in India traffic, on public bus, packed like sardines. Commuting there was not the most pleasant thing in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Two years later, Vaikuntanathan enrolled in the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, in Chennai, a top engineering school in one of the country\u2019s largest cities. \u201cThat\u2019s where things started,\u201d Vaikuntanathan says. As he had at his previous institute, Vaikuntanathan formed a \u201cband of brothers\u201d \u2014\u00a0a trio of students, including himself, who began studying cryptography.<\/p>\n Then, in his junior year, his professor gave him a copy of \u201cLecture Notes on Cryptography,\u201d about 300 pages of printed-out, compiled notes from a course on cryptography taught at MIT by Shafi Goldwasser and Mihir Bellare. \u201cOur professor gave it to us and said, \u2018Go read it and don\u2019t bother me for a year,\u2019\u201d Vaikuntanathan says.<\/p>\n Working with \u201cgiants in the field\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Vaikuntanathan sought to carry his interest in cryptography to graduate school. Accepted into MIT and the University of California at Berkeley, Vaikuntanathan recalls asking his father for advice on which to attend: \u201cI showed him pictures from Google of Cambridge, and they\u2019re the dead of winter, with the frozen Charles River; and then Berkeley, which was sunny and full of life. My father said, \u2018Go to Berkeley,\u2019 and I said, \u2018No, I\u2019m going to MIT.\u2019 It was the obvious choice, because it\u2019s where the giants in the field were.\u201d<\/p>\n One of those giants was Goldwasser, who became a graduate studies advisor: \u201cI learned from her books to begin with, so that was quite fantastic.\u201d<\/p>\n Some of his major MIT work revolved around reinforcing cryptography against the coming age of quantum computing. This involved using lattices, an architecture that uses number theory and hides data inside very complex math problems that even quantum computers can\u2019t crack. His PhD studies culminated in co-inventing lattice-based cryptography schemes; he also developed a toolkit to teach others how to build and modify those schemes, along with former classmate and mentor Chris Peikert and Stanford University\u2019s Craig Gentry.<\/p>\n After earning his PhD, Vaikuntanathan worked briefly as a researcher at IBM and Microsoft. During that time, Gentry invented fully homomorphic encryption, \u201cwhich changed the world for all of us\u201d working in cryptography, Vaikuntanathan says. But the original model was too computationally expensive to be practical. \u201cFor a while, fully homomorphic encryption was nice for cryptography kids to play with, but was useless otherwise,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n In the late 2000s Vaikuntanathan, together with Gentry and Zvika Brakerski of the Weizmann Institute of Science, integrated lattices into fully homomorphic encryption techniques, creating a model that achieved far better security and efficiency. Other researchers have since built on top of the model, which is freely available on Github as BGV (Brakerski-Gentry-Vaikuntanathan). \u201cPeople have refined that system again and again,\u201d Vaikuntanathan says. \u201cIt\u2019s interesting to see how far it\u2019s come in nearly 10 years.\u201d<\/p>\n Vaikuntanathan then taught for a couple years at the University of Toronto. During a summer as a visiting researcher at MIT, however, knew he had to return. \u201cI knew this place had people with boundless energy, creativity, enthusiasm, and optimism,\u201d he says. \u201cIt drew me back.\u201d<\/p>\n Vaikuntanathan started teaching at MIT in 2013. Two years ago, he co-founded a startup, Duality Technologies, with Goldwasser and others to develop cryptography technologies that enable users to carry out complex computations and analytics on encrypted data. To Vaikuntanathan, the startup represents how the mathematical concepts he delved into all those years ago have come to fruition.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s exciting to see the transition from abstract number theory into these very concrete applications,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Go to Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"