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UW CSE | Systems Research | Applied Cryptography |
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Cryptography is an age-old art revolving around the design of secure communication protocols -- protocols capable of protecting the confidentiality and integrity of communicated messages in the presence of adversaries. Despite such a long history, modern cryptographic protocols are often found to have serious security problems.
Our principal research goal is to provide a rigorous foundation for the security of modern cryptographic protocols, thereby lifting cryptography from an art to a science and helping ensure that future cryptographic protocols do not suffer from subtle and unexpected bugs. Our high-level approach is not unique to us -- indeed, our approach derives from the seminal research in provable security by Goldwasser and Micali and its practice-oriented extension by Bellare and Rogaway. But our perspective is uniquely systems-oriented: we revolve much of our research around the pragmatic constraints of real systems. For example, after discovering a security vulnerability in a portion of the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol, we developed provably secure fixes that are not only compatible with existing artifacts of the SSH protocol, like the internal packet format, but that exploit the presence of these artifacts for security.
We also research new cryptanalytic techniques for assessing the security of cryptographic constructs that are not amenable to our provable security-based analyses. Examples of such research include our introduction of a new method for cryptanalyzing block ciphers and our introduction of a new class of attacks against hash functions.
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Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington Box 352350 Seattle, WA 98195-2350 (206) 543-1695 voice, (206) 543-2969 FAX [comments to yoshi] |