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Trust in an Untrusted World: Private Access over Public Infrastructures by Prof. Divy Agrawal
September 29 @ 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Abstract:
We are living in an era where our digital lives are increasingly interdependent
and deeply interconnected. These connections rely on a vast, layered ecosystem of
actors—many of whose trustworthiness is uncertain or outright suspect. Over the past three
decades, rapid advances in computing and communication technologies have brought
unprecedented access and connectivity to billions of users. Yet this digitization comes at a cost:
our interactions, queries, and data are increasingly vulnerable to privacy violations. Today,
threats to privacy come not just from malicious individuals, but also from powerful
institutions—ranging from service providers to nation-states.
In this reality of an untrusted world, we pose several foundational research questions: (i) Can
we design a scalable voice communication system that ensures absolute privacy? (ii) Can
we build an oblivious search engine over public document repositories? (iii) Can we develop
scalable private query processing over shared or public databases? (iv) And in the age of
large language models, can we enable private inference for user queries? These are not just
open problems — they are essential challenges if we are to build trusted services over
untrusted infrastructures. In this talk, I will present recent work that leverages Homomorphic
Encryption to address some of these questions. We explore the inherent performance and
scalability trade-offs in enabling private access, search, and inference. If nothing else, our
results underscore a critical insight: ensuring privacy at scale is not impossible, but it
comes at a high cost.