Protect

The World Wide Web and computer "clouds" have become widely used, and are interwoven into many activities of daily life, from shopping to socializing to education. But the data center servers that are the backbone of this richly connected world remain vulnerable to malicious software ("malware"). Over the past decade, attacks have increased in number and sophistication, motivated by both financial and political goals. The results include consumer concerns about identify theft and fraudulent charges, corporate concerns about millions of dollars in losses, and potential defense concerns.

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.

As passive tagging technologies like RFID become more economical and ubiquitous, it can be envisioned that in the future, millions of sensors integrated with these tags could become an integral part of the next generation of smart infrastructure and the overall concept of internet-of-things. As a result, securing these passive assets against data theft and counterfeiting would become a priority, reinforcing the importance of the proposed dynamic authentication techniques.

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is a promising new technology that enables an untrusted party to efficiently compute directly on ciphertexts. For instance, with FHE a cloud server without access to the user's encrypted content can still provide text search services. An efficient FHE scheme would significantly improve the security of sensitive user data stored and processed on cloud servers. Significant progress has been made in bringing FHE proposals closer to practice.