Fermi Ma will present his generals exam Friday, May 26, 2017 at 10am in CS 302. The members of his committee are: Mark Zhandry (adviser) Zeev Dvir, and Ed Felten Everyone is invited to attend his talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. His abstract and reading list follow below. We define the concept of an encryptor combiner. Roughly, such a combiner takes as input n public keys for a public key encryption scheme, and produces a new combined public key. Anyone knowing a secret key for one of the input public keys can learn the secret key for the combined public key, but an outsider who just knows the input public keys (who can therefore compute the combined public key for himself) cannot decrypt ciphertexts from the combined public key. We actually think of public keys more generally as encryption procedures, which can correspond to, say, encrypting to a particular identity under an IBE scheme or encrypting to a set of attributes under an ABE scheme. We show that encryptor combiners satisfying certain natural properties can give natural constructions of multi-party non-interactive key exchange, low-overhead broadcast encryption, and hierarchical identity-based encryption. We then show how to construct two different encryptor combiners. Our first is built from universal samplers (which can in turn be built from indistinguishability obfuscation) and is sufficient for each application above, in some cases improving on existing obfuscation-based constructions. Our second is built from lattices, and is sufficient for hierarchical identity-based encryption. Thus, encryptor combiners serve as a new abstraction that (1) is a useful tool for designing cryptosystems, (2) unifies constructing hierarchical IBE from vastly different assumptions, and (3) provides a target for instantiating obfuscation applications from better tools. The sub-area of cryptography that my research / reading list focuses on is obfuscation. The reading list is as follows: On the (Im)possibility of Obfuscating Programs (2010) Boaz Barak, Oded Goldreich, Russell Impagliazzo, Steven Rudich, Amit Sahai, Salil Vadhan, and Ke Yang http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/PS/obf4.pdf Multiparty Key Exchange, Efficient Traitor Tracing, and More from Indistinguishability Obfuscation (2013) Dan Boneh and Mark Zhandry https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/642.pdf Candidate Multilinear Maps from Ideal Lattices (2012) Sanjam Garg, Craig Gentry, and Shai Halevi https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/610.pdf Candidate Indistinguishability Obfuscation and Functional Encryption for all Circuits (2013) Sanjam Garg, Craig Gentry, Shai Halevi, Mariana Raykova, Amit Sahai, and Brent Waters https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/451.pdf Practical Multilinear Maps over the Integers (2013) Jean-Sebastien Coron, Tancrede Lepoint, and Mehdi Tibouchi https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/183.pdf Cryptanalysis of the Multilinear Map over the Integers (2014) Jung Hee Cheon, Kyoohyung Han, Changmin Lee, Hansol Ryu, and Damien Stehle https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/906.pdf Annihilation Attacks for Multilinear Maps: Cryptanalysis of Indistinguishability Obfuscation over GGH13 (2016) Eric Miles, Amit Sahai, and Mark Zhandry https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/147.pdf Secure Obfuscation in a Weak Multilinear Map Model: A Simple Construction Secure Against All Known Attacks (2016) Eric Miles, Amit Sahai, and Mark Zhandry https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/588.pdf and the textbook "Introduction to Modern Cryptography: Principles and Protocols" by Katz and Lindell.