On Tuesday, June 30 in Philadelphia, CSE Prof. Mihir Bellare was among the recipients of the 2015 Privacy-Enhancing Technologies Award. The ceremony was part of the annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) Symposium. The award honored the three co-authors of a 2014 paper on "Security of Symmetric Encryption Against Mass Surveillance." In their paper, Bellare and his co-authors Phillip Rogaway from UC Davis and Kenneth Paterson at Royal Holloway University of London, described how they were "motivated by revelations concerning population-wide surveillance of encrypted communications" by the National Security Agency, as disclosed in documents released by Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks. [Picturedt: UCSD's Bellare, at left, and Rogaway from UC Davis accepting the PET Award in Philadelphia.]
In their paper, Bellare and his colleagues formalized and investigated the resistance of symmetric encryption schemes to mass surveillance, focusing primarily on one type: so-called algorithm-substitution attacks, or ASAs. This involves "big brother" replacing an existing algorithm for encryption with a subverted encryption algorithm. The computer scientists offered both attacks and defenses to ASAs. Among the latter, they showed "how to design symmetric encryption schemes that avoid [ASA] attacks and meet our notion of security."
Download the prize-winning paper from Advances in Cryptography - CRYPTO 2014.