Theory Seminar
"Closed Doors and Open Windows: Cryptography in the Age of Mass Surveillance"
Mihir Bellare
(UCSD)
Tuesday, November 17th, 2015, 1:00 pm
EBU3B, Room 4258
Abstract:
The summer of 2013 brought shocking news of mass surveillance being conducted by the NSA and its counter-parts in other countries. The documents revealed new ways in which the adversary compromises security, ways not covered by standard models and definitions in cryptography. This opens up a new research agenda, namely to formalize security goals that defend against these novel attacks, and study the achievability of these goals. This talk is about a few works in this vein. We consider algorithm substitution attacks, big-key cryptography, and non-interactive zero-knowledge with an un-trusted reference string.