Ioannis Demertzis

Bio

Nowadays, a large part of our personal data, ranging from medical and financial records to our social activity, are stored online in cloud servers. Frequent data breaches threaten to expose these data to malicious third parties, often with catastrophic consequences (estimated to several billion of US dollars annually). To prevent dealing with such undesirable situations policymakers impose strict regulations on companies storing user data, e.g., the recent GDPR European Union regulation requires that data are stored encrypted and claims that encrypted storage is relatively safe only if the data owner, not the cloud service, holds the decryption keys. Thus, the following question arises: how can one efficiently directly query and compute on encrypted data without first decrypting them, a subject that has been the focus of a rapidly growing line of research works over the past few years. Dr. Demertzis' research focuses on tackling the above problems by designing and implementing protocols and sys- tems that work directly on encrypted data. His work lies at applied cryptography, security & privacy, and secure databases/systems. He is actively working on bridging the efficiency-security gap between cryptog- raphy/security and real-world systems/databases by working in both areas; aiming to build cryptographic solutions and real systems that are simultaneously practical, efficient, and provably secure.