Seminar by Assoc Prof Yuan Xingliang, University of Melbourne, Australia, RTP Harvard Room

Time: 17 Feb 2025, 2.00pm to 3.00pm

Venue: Research Techno Plaza (RTP), Level 2, Harvard Room

Title: Attacks and Defenses in Encrypted Search: Where Are We Now?

Bio: Xingliang Yuan is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems, the University of Melbourne. Prior to that, he was a faculty member at Monash University from 2017 to 2024. He has a keen interest in designing systems and protocols to address real-world security challenges. His current research focuses on data privacy, secure networked systems, and trustworthy machine learning. His research has been supported by Australian Research Council, CSIRO, Australian Department of Home Affairs, Australian Department of Health and Aged Care, and the Oceania Cyber Security Centre. His work has been published in major venues of computer security, such as CCS, S&P, USENIX Security, NDSS, TDSC, TIFS, etc. He is a sole recipient of the Dean's Award for Excellence in Research by an Early Career Researcher (2020), and the Faculty Teaching Excellence Award (2021) at Monash. He is on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing and IEEE Transactions on Service Computing. He is a program co-chair of Lamps@CCS'24, SecTL@AsiaCCS'23, NSS'22, a general co-chair of RAID'25, and a track co-chair of ICDCS'24, WISE'24, MSN'24. He is a senior member of IEEE, and a future fellow of Australian Research Council.

Abstract: The critical importance of protecting sensitive data is globally recognized. It is desired that sensitive data remains encrypted at all times—whether at rest, in transit, or in use. Achieving this goal is significantly challenging in the realm of modern databases. The core difficulty lies in enabling search over encrypted data, i.e., encrypted search, while balancing security, performance, and the ability to support diverse search functions. In this talk, I will provide a retrospective look at the evolution of encrypted search research, which has seen remarkable progress over the past decades. I will particularly focus on a recent focal point, i.e., leakage attacks and defenses in encrypted search, given its increasing deployment in the real-world. I will also pinpoint some on-going challenges and outline a roadmap for future research.