Dr. Radu Sion receives the most prestigious NSF Award for $400k/5 years, starting in September 2009.

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Computer Science Professor Radu Sion receives the prestigious NSF Career Award for $400k/5 years, starting in September 2009.

Dr. Radu Sion

"Practical Privacy for Outsourcing Systems"

As computing becomes embedded in the very fabric of our society, the exponential growth and advances in cheap, high-speed communication infrastructures allow for unprecedented levels of global information exchange and interaction. As a result, new market forces emerge that propel toward a fundamental, cost-efficient paradigm shift in the way computing is deployed and delivered: computing outsourcing.

Outsourcing has the potential to minimize client-side management overheads and benefit from a service provider's global expertise consolidation and bulk pricing. Companies such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Sun are rushing to offer increasingly complex storage and computation outsourcing services supported by globally distributed "cloud" infrastructures.

Yet significant challenges lie in the path to successful large-scale adoption. In business, healthcare and government frameworks, clients are reluctant to place sensitive data under the control of a remote, third- party provider, without practical assurances of privacy and confidentiality.

Today's solutions however, do not offer such assurances, and are thus fundamentally insecure and vulnerable to illicit behavior. Existing research addresses several aspects of this problem, but advancing the state of the art to practical realms will require a fundamental leap.

In this project we address these challenges by designing, implementing and analyzing practical data outsourcing protocols with strong assurances of privacy and confidentiality.

Additionally, we will initiate also the exploration of the cost and energy footprints of outsourcing mechanisms. This is essential as the main raison d'etre of outsourcing paradigms lies in their assumed end-to-end cost savings and expertise consolidation. However, research has yet to explore and validate the magnitudes of these savings and their underlying assumptions.