Publications by Kirill Nikitin

Authenticated private information retrieval

Bryan Alexander Ford, Simone Maria Stefano Colombo, Henry Nathaniel Corrigan-Gibbs, Kirill Nikitin

This paper introduces protocols for authenticated private information retrieval. These schemes enable a client to fetch a record from a remote database server such that (a) the server does not learn which record the client reads, and (b) the client either ...

Usenix Assoc2023

Integrity and Metadata Protection in Data Retrieval

Kirill Nikitin

Secure retrieval of data requires integrity, confidentially, transparency, and metadata-privacy of the process. Existing protection mechanisms, however, provide only partially these properties: encryption schemes still expose cleartext metadata, protocols ...

EPFL2021

Replicated state machines without replicated execution

Kirill Nikitin

This paper introduces a new approach to reduce end-to-end costs in large-scale replicated systems built under a Byzantine fault model. Specifically, our approach transforms a given replicated state machine (RSM) to another RSM where nodes incur lower costs ...

IEEE2020

Reducing Metadata Leakage from Encrypted Files and Communication with PURBs

Jean-Pierre Hubaux, Bryan Alexander Ford, Ludovic Barman, Kirill Nikitin, Wouter Lueks, Matthew Joshua Underwood

Most encrypted data formats leak metadata via their plaintext headers, such as format version, encryption schemes used, number of recipients who can decrypt the data, and even the recipients’ identities. This leakage can pose security and privacy risks to ...

Sciendo2019

CHAINIAC: Proactive Software-Update Transparency via Collectively Signed Skipchains and Verified Builds

Bryan Alexander Ford, Linus Gasser, Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias, Philipp Svetolik Jovanovic, Nicolas Gailly, Kirill Nikitin, Ismail Khoffi

Software-update mechanisms are critical to the security of modern systems, but their typically centralized design presents a lucrative and frequently attacked target. In this work, we propose CHAINIAC, a decentralized software-update framework that elimina ...

USENIX Association2017