The Synergy Between Programming Languages and Cryptography (Dagstuhl Seminar 14492)

Increasingly, modern cryptography (crypto) has moved beyond the problem of secure communication to a broader consideration of securing computation. The past thirty years have seen a steady progression of both theoretical and practical advances in designing cryptographic protocols for problems such as secure multiparty computation, searching and computing on encrypted data, verifiable storage and computation, statistical data privacy, and more. More recently, the programming-languages (PL) community has begun to tackle the same set of problems, but from a different perspective, focusing on issues such as language design (e.g., new features or type systems), formal methods (e.g., model checking, deductive verification, static and dynamic analysis), compiler optimizations, and analyses of side-channel attacks and information leakage. This seminar helped to cross-fertilize ideas between the PL and crypto communities, exploiting the synergies for advancing the development of secure computing, broadly speaking, and fostering new research directions in and across both communities.