[talks] Marcela Melara will present her General Exam Tuesday, April 21, 2015 at 10am in Rm 301

[Nicki Gotsis]

Marcela Melara will present her General Exam Tuesday, April 21, 2015 at 10am in Rm 301

The members of her committee are: Ed Felten (advisor), Mike Freedman, Arvind Narayanan.

Everyone is invited to attend her talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.  Her abstract and reading list follow below.


Abstract:
We present CONIKS, an end-user key verification service capable of integration in end-to-end encrypted communication systems. CONIKS builds on related designs for transparency of web server certificates but solves several new challenges specific to key verification for end users. In comparison to prior designs, CONIKS enables more efficient monitoring and auditing of keys, allowing small organizations to effectively audit even very large key servers. CONIKS users can efficiently monitor their own key bindings for consistency, downloading less than 20 kB per day to do so even for a provider with billions of users. CONIKS users and providers can collectively audit providers for non-equivocation, and this requires downloading a constant 2.5 kB per day regardless of server size. Unlike any previous proposal, CONIKS also preserves the level of privacy offered by today’s major communication services, hiding the list of usernames present and even allowing providers to conceal the total number of users in the system.

Reading List:
J. Li, M. Krohn, D. Mazieres and D. Shasha, “Secure Untrusted Data Repository (SUNDR).” OSDI, 2004.
R. C. Merkle, “A digital signature based on a conventional encryption function.” CRYPTO, 1987.
S.Micali, M. Rabin and S. Vadhan, “Verifiable Random Functions.” FOCS, 1999.
D. Wendlandt, D. G. Andersen, A. Perrig, “Perspectives: Improving SSH-style Host Authentication with Multi-Path Probing.” USENIX Security Symposium, 2008.
B. Laurie, “Certificate Transparency.” ACM Queue, 2014.
M. D. Ryan, “Enhanced Certificate Transparency and End-to-End Encrypted Mail.” NDSS, 2014.
A. Ulrich, R. Holz, P .Hauck and G. Carle, “Investigating the OpenPGP web of trust.” ESORICS, 2011.
C. Ellison, “Establishing identity without certification authorities.” Usenix Security, 1996.
D. Mazieres, M. Kaminsky, M. F. Kaashoek and E. Witchel, “Separating key management from file system security.” SOSP, 1999.
N. Borisov, I. Goldberg and E. Brewer, “Off-the-Record Communication, or, why not to use PGP.” WPES, 2004.
A. Whitten and J. D. Tygar, “Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0.” Usenix Security, 1999.
T. Perrin, “Axolotl Ratchet.” https://github.com/trevp/axolotl/wiki
R. Andersen, “Security Engineering,” 2nd Ed., 2008. Chapters 3, 5, 6, 21.
J. Katz and Y. Lindell, “Introduction to Modern Cryptography”, 1st Ed., 2007.