Abstract
Cryptography is essential for securing communication over public networks and protecting sensitive information from adversaries. It is studied through two main approaches: applied and theoretical. Applied cryptography focuses on practical protocols used in real-world systems, often relying on heuristics, while theoretical cryptography takes a mathematical approach, proving security based on computational hardness assumptions like the discrete logarithm problem and integer factorization.
Despite their symbiotic relationship, a significant gap remains between theory and practice. In this talk, we will explore the nature of this gap and its implications for modern cryptography.
Zhiye Xie's Bio
Zhiye Xie is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at New York University Shanghai, advised by Siyao Guo. He earned his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from NYU Shanghai in 2020. His research interests lie broadly in theoretical computer science, with a particular focus on cryptography, meta-complexity, randomness extraction, and secure multiparty computation.
Zhiye Xie worked with Prof. Siyao Guo and her lab to establish a tight bound for the decisional Diffie-Hellman problem in the time-space setting, resolving a long-standing open problem. More recently, he collaborated with Google Research to develop a differentially private, streamed, secure single-server aggregation protocol, advancing privacy-preserving data analysis. His research has been published in top venues, including STOC, CRYPTO, and ITC.