Cryptography Primer – What Can Go Wrong

This will be the first of six cryptography primer sessions exploring the basics of modern cryptography. In this session, we’ll explore the basics of security protocols and how they can fail spectacularly. This will lay the groundwork for subsequent sessions which will delve more deeply into specifics.

Subsequent sessions (on alternating Fridays) are expected to include the following topics. Depending on the interests of the participants, other topics may be included or substituted. • Symmetric functions including RC4, DES, AES, SHA1, and the SHA-2 family • Integer asymmetric functions including BigNums, Diffie-Hellman, RSA, and DSA • Non-integer asymmetric functions including elliptic curves and lattice-based systems • Protocol properties including forward secrecy, crypto agility, and certificate management • Applications including zero-knowledge, secret sharing, homomorphic encryption, and election protocols

Speaker Details

Josh Benaloh is Senior Cryptographer at Microsoft Research. He earned his S.B. degree at M.I.T. and M.S., M. Phil., and Ph.D. degrees at Yale University where his doctoral dissertation Verifiable Secret-Ballot Elections made the first substantive use of homomorphic encryption techniques and introduced a new paradigm for achieving election integrity. Josh serves as an elected director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research and an editor of the Journal of Election Technologies and Systems. He also serves on Microsoft’s Crypto Board and its PKI Working Group and in his copious spare time serves as Chair of Sound Transit’s Citizen Oversight Panel.

Series:
Microsoft Research Talks
Date:
Speakers:
Josh Benaloh
Affiliation:
Microsoft Research XCG Lab

Series: Microsoft Research Talks