Mihir Bellare (UCSD)
Monday, May 1, 2017, 2:00pm
Title: Cryptography in the Age of Mass Surveillance
Abstract:
We discuss a body of work that considers cryptographic security in the age of mass surveillance unveiled by the Snowden and FBI revelations. We discuss new threat vectors, craft models and definitions that capture them, give attacks violating security of some schemes, and then provide other, proven-secure schemes. Specifically we will discuss algorithm-substitution attacks, resistance to key exfiltration via big-key cryptography, subversion of randomness, subversion of public parameters and subversion of certificates. Primitives considered in this light include symmetric encryption, public-key encryption and zero-knowledge protocols. The talk touches on multiple papers, co-authors of which include Georg Fuchsbauer, Viet Tung Hoang, Joseph Jaeger, Daniel Kane, Kenny Paterson, Bertram Poettering, Phillip Rogaway, Alessandra Scafuro, Douglas Stebila.
Paper links:
- Security of Symmetric Encryption against Mass Surveillance (Bellare, Paterson, Rogaway)
- Resisting Randomness Subversion: Fast Deterministic and Hedged Public-key Encryption in the Standard Model (Bellare, Hoang)
- Mass-surveillance without the State: Strongly Undetectable Algorithm-Substitution Attacks (Bellare, Jaeger, Kane)
- Nonce-Based Cryptography: Retaining Security when Randomness Fails (Bellare, Tackmann)
- NIZKs with an Untrusted CRS: Security in the Face of Parameter Subversion (Bellare, Fuchsbauer, Scafuro)
- Big-Key Symmetric Encryption: Resisting Key Exfiltration (Bellare, Kane, Rogaway)
- Deterring Certificate Subversion: Efficient Double-Authentication-Preventing Signatures (Bellare, Poettering, Stebila)