Modern Cryptography provides algorithmic solutions to securely compute over the private data of mutually distrustful parties. These solutions require algorithmic or physical building blocks such as computational assumptions, trusted hardware, correlated private randomness and noisy channels. A fundamental limitation of these solutions is that their security necessarily hinges on the assumption that these underlying building blocks are free of any imperfection. Over the last decade, however, this assumption has been repeatedly proven false in the real world, often rendering these solutions completely insecure.

This raises the following important question: "Can secure computation be based on imperfect building blocks?"

In this talk, I will present algorithmic solutions that resolve this question in the affirmative.

Hemanta K. Maji is a post-doctoral researcher and a Center Fellow at the Center of Encrypted Functionalities in University of California, Los Angeles. He was a Computing Innovations Fellow sponsored by Computing Research Association from 2011 to 2013. He obtained his Ph.D. in computer science from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and his undergraduate B.Tech. from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. His research interest is cryptography, in general, and secure computation, in particular. He has over 15 original peer reviewed publications at venues like FOCS, CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT and Innovations in Computer Science. His current research focuses on developing highly resilient protocols with strong mathematical security guarantees which are practically deployable.