Authentication

The growing hardware security community is faced with an immediate need to develop effective tools and benchmarks. The purpose of this project is to lead a community-wide movement toward stronger assurances in our integrated circuits, computational platforms, and electronics supply chain.

Interoperable, reconfigurable systems of medical devices are the future of medical technology. They will improve care outcomes by catching common mistakes, reduce clinician cognitive workload by suppressing false alarms, and streamline and simplify continued care, especially when patients move between different medical facilities. As the penetration of "smart" networked medical technology increases, we will see increased problems with cybersecurity of such systems.

In order to establish a secure communication channel, each communicating party needs some method to authenticate the other, lest it unwittingly establish a channel with the adversary instead. Current techniques for authentication often rely on passwords and/or the public-key infrastructure (PKI). Both of these methods have considerable drawbacks since passwords are frequently breached, and PKI relies on central authorities which have proven to be less than reliable. Thus there is a need to use other sources of information for the communicating parties to authenticate each other.

Cyber security is considered one of the most important aspects of our information technology based society. Key Exchange(KE) is a fundamental cryptographic primitive, and authenticated KE (AKE) is one of the most used cryptographic tools in secure communication protocols (e.g. SSL/TLS, IPSec, SSH) over the Internet. In light of the threat that quantum computers pose to cryptosystems such as RSA and ECC, this project is devoted to the development of secure and efficient AKE alternatives for the post-quantum computer world, which is now considered of a high priority by the US government.

The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol constitutes the key building block for today's Internet security and is, for example, used for encrypted web connections using the HTTPS protocol. However, from its first version in 1994 until today, researchers and practitioners keep discovering TLS deficiencies undermining the protocol's security on a regular basis. While the academic community has applied intense scrutiny to the TLS/X.509 ecosystem, much of such work depends on access to difficult to acquire representative data on the protocol's deployment and usage.