Cathie Yun

Cathie Yun

Applied Cryptographer, Security Engineer

Posts by Collection

portfolio

publications

Splinter: Practical Private Queries on Public Data

Published in Proceedings of the 14th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '17), Boston, March, 2017

This paper presents Splinter, a system that protects users’ queries on public datasets while achieving practical performance for many current web applications.

Recommended citation: Frank Wang, Catherine Yun, Shafi Goldwasser, and Vinod Vaikuntanathan. (2017). "Splinter: Practical Private Queries on Public Data." In Proceedings of the 14th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '17), Boston, March. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/nsdi17/nsdi17-wang-frank.pdf

TxVM: A New Design for Blockchain Transactions

Published March 2018

With TxVM we seek to combine the respective strengths of the declarative and imperative approaches to representing blockchain transactions, while avoiding their weaknesses.

Recommended citation: Bob Glickstein, Cathie Yun, Dan Robinson, Keith Rarick, Oleg Andreev. (2018). "TxVM: A New Design for Blockchain Transactions.". https://chain.com/assets/txvm.pdf

ACORN: Input Validation for Secure Aggregation

Published in Under submission, 2022

This paper presents ACORN, an secure aggregation extension that enables input validation to prevent malicious clients from gaining disproportionate influence on the computed aggregated statistics or machine learning model.

Recommended citation: James Bell, Adrià Gascón, Tancrède Lepoint, Baiyu Li, Sarah Meiklejohn, Mariana Raykova, Cathie Yun. (2022). "ACORN: Input Validation for Secure Aggregation." https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1461

talks

TxVM: A New Design for Blockchain Transactions

Published:

Video and Slides. In this talk, I announce TxVM, a powerful new design for blockchain transactions. TxVM seeks to achieve the expressiveness and flexibility of an imperative contract model such as Ethereum’s while maintaining the efficiency, safety, and scalability of a declarative transaction model such as Bitcoin’s.

R1CS and Smart Contracts with Bulletproofs

Published:

Video and Slides. In this talk, I discuss how we implemented the R1CS (rank one constraint system) API for flexibly programming proofs with the Bulletproofs zero knowledge proof system. I also discuss how to build a confidential assets protocol, as well as how to make a usable smart contract language, using that API. This talk is a precursor to the official release of ZkVM, the zero knowledge smart contract language that we developed using these techniques.

How Zero Knowledge Proofs Work

Published:

Video. Zero knowledge proofs are powerful tools; come learn about how they work and what they enable! We’ll get down and dirty in the details of Bulletproofs, a zero knowledge proof protocol that doesn’t require trusted setup. I’ll walk you through the math/crypto of Bulletproofs, alongside my open-source implementation in Rust. You’ll walk away with an appreciation for zero knowledge proofs, a deeper understanding of Bulletproofs, and hopefully some interest in tinkering on or building systems with zero knowledge proof protocols yourself!

Trust Tokens: How Much Do We Trust Them?

Published:

Video. This talk is a peek inside the cryptography security review process at Google, looking at the Trust Tokens protocol based on Privacy Pass. I reviewed this protocol before it was deployed, and it is now in use in Google Chrome help Chrome differentiate between bots and real users.

Ask Me Anything: Cryptographers Panel

Published:

Video. I sat on an “Ask Me Anything” panel at Real World Crypto 2022 to talk about the relationship between cryptography research and its use in industry, give advice to folks starting out their cryptography career, and to defend the usefulness of blockchains (at least, as a way to fund really cool cryptography research).

Unlocking the potential of FHE - Google

Published:

Shruthi and I gave a talk at Safer With Google, the Google internal security summit, about our team’s work on making Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) practical. The video and slides are not available to the public, but Googlers can view them at the internal golink: go/swg-summit.

Moving toward real-world deployment of FHE - NIST

Published:

Video and Slides. I presented on Google’s work toward real-world deployment of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), at the NIST Crypto Reading Club. This talk provides an engineer’s perspective on deploying large scale systems with FHE, its practical challenges, and open problems. The talk highlights the importance of compilers in realizing FHE as a privacy tool. It also includes a deeper dive into the FHE transpiler open sourced by Google, its modular architecture, and how it can accelerate FHE research and software development.

teaching

Teaching experience 1

Undergraduate course, University 1, Department, 2014

This is a description of a teaching experience. You can use markdown like any other post.

Teaching experience 2

Workshop, University 1, Department, 2015

This is a description of a teaching experience. You can use markdown like any other post.