Date and time: Nov 7, 2025, 12-1:45pm
Location: Rice 109
Title: Advancements and Applications of Homomorphic Secret Sharing
Abstract:
A long-standing goal in cryptography is to enable multiple parties to compute a public function on their private inputs without revealing them to each other. Ideally, we want the efficiency of such a protocol to be comparable to computing the function directly. Homomorphic secret sharing (HSS) is one of several promising approaches to this problem. In HSS, parties hold random shares of their inputs, perform all computation locally based on the function, and exchange only minimal information at the end to recover the true result. This property makes HSS a valuable building block for efficient multi-party computation protocols with low communication cost. This talk introduces the main ideas behind HSS, how recent advancements have made it increasingly efficient compared to its alternatives [BGI16], and shows how it plays a central role in modern secure computation [OSY21].
[BGI16] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/585.pdf
[OSY21] https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/262.pdf
Bio: Chase Fickes is a second year PhD student at the University of Virginia being advised by Wei-Kai Lin. His research interests lie broadly in cryptography and algorithms, with a focus on reducing communication costs in multi-party computation and garbling schemes.