Papamanthou Receives NetApp Faculty Fellowship Award

Charalampos (Babis) Papamanthou, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2), recently received a NetApp Faculty Fellowship grant.

The $60,000 award supports Papamanthou and Roberto Tamassia, the Plastech Professor of Computer Science at Brown University, who are collaborating on research involving secure deduplication and compression for big data.

The research is focused on hybrid clouds, a computing environment that employs both private and public cloud services. These clouds are increasingly being deployed because they are efficient and relatively inexpensive, Papamanthou says, and are designed to offer seamless data movement between public and private environments.

But significant challenges can arise in developing robust encryption techniques that work well with functions like search, deduplication and compression, he says.

Papamanthou and Tamassia—working with graduate students at each institution—plan to focus their research on two key areas: deduplication of encrypted data; and searching compressed and encrypted data.

They propose a new technique for deduplicating encrypted data that is based on locality-sensitive hashing, and also tolerates small changes in the underlying plaintext data without increasing the required storage space too much.

For search, they propose new compression techniques—inspired by feedback from the database community—to perform searches on encrypted data much more efficiently than existing systems.

The end goal of the project, the researchers say, is to improve the state-of-the-art both in theory and systems, possibly leading to new approaches and algorithms for performing more efficient queries on deduplicated and compressed unencrypted data.

NetApp is a Fortune 500 multinational storage and data management company based in Sunnyvale, California. The Faculty Fellowship program—funded by NetApp’s Advanced Technology Group—encourages leading-edge research in storage and data management and is designed to foster relationships between academic researchers and NetApp’s technical community.

MC2 is supported by the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences and the A. James Clark School of Engineering. It is one of 16 labs and centers in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies.

Go here to see a video overview of the work that Papamanthou does in security for cloud computing.