I took sketchier notes as the workshop progressed, partly due to the ICASSP deadline, but also because jet lag started to hit me. The second day was a half day, which started with Zhenjie Zhang giving a tutorial on differential privacy from a databases/data mining perspective and my talk on more machine learning aspects. In between us was a talk by Ben Smyth on building automatic verification for security protocols. Basically you write the protocol as a program and then the ProVerif verifier will go and try to break your protocol. As an example, it can automatically find/generate a man-in-the-middle attack if one exists. I thought it was pretty neat, especially after having recently talked to someone about automatic proof systems. It’s based on something called the applied pi calculus, which I did not understand at all, but hey, I learned something new, which was great. The last two talks of the day were by Lalitha Sankar and Mari Kobayashi. Lalitha talked about mutual information based measures of privacy leakage in an interactive communication setting that is the information-theoretic analogue of communication complexity models in CS. Mari talked about the broadcast channel with state feedback. This is trying to find secure analogues of these opportunistic multicast settings where you need to also generate a secret key.

The last day was on quantum! I learned a lot and took few notes, unfortunately. Andreas Winter gave a tutorial on quantum (the slides for most talks are online and his are as well) and Ciara Morgan discussed the challenges in proving a strong converse for the the capacity of quantum channels. Damian Markham talked about secret sharing in quantum systems. Masahito Hayashi gave a very densely-packed talk surveying a large number of results based on secure randomness extraction and hash functions using Rényi information measures. I think privacy amplification is really interesting but I think I need a tutorial on it before I can really get the research results. The last non-overview talk I have notes on was by David Elkouss (apologies to the remaining speakers): this was a really interesting presentation on how to decide which of two channels is better from a quantum communication sense. The slides are a little engimatic, but the papers are online.

Shlomo Shamai made it to the last day of the workshop (the intersection with High Holidays was unfortunate) — he talked about the layered secrecy view of the broadcast channel: rather than thinking only of the secret message as carrying information, one can think of certain layers (c.f. superposition coding) as being secured based on the channel to the non-legitimate receiver. For example, in a degraded broadcast channel, the strong receiver’s message can sometimes be thought of as secret from the weak receiver. This leads to a raft of models and setups based on who wants to keep what secret from whom, shedding some light on standard superposition, rate splitting, binning, and embedding constructions. The talk was largely based on a paper in the current issues of the Proceedings of the IEEE.

All in all, this was a really great workshop, and the organizers were very generous in the organization.