[Colloq] Ph.D. Thesis Proposal, Tuesday, April 2, 149 CN 10:00am

[Rachel Bates]

Tuesday, April 2, 2002
10:00am
149 Cullinane Hall


Duncan S. Wong
Ph.D. Thesis Proposal (part of the Ph.D. Comprehensive Exam)
"On the Design and Analysis of Authenticated Key Exchange Schemes
for Low Power Wireless Computing Platforms"


ABSTRACT

The goal of an authenticated key exchange protocol between two
communicating parties is to provide them with some assurance that
they know each other's true identity and at the same time to have
the two parties end up sharing a session key known only to them.
This session key can then be used to provide privacy and data
integrity for target applications.  We focus our attention on the
design and analysis of such schemes for the two parties where one
of them is strictly limited in both computational power and memory
capacity while the other is as powerful as a conventional desktop
machine.  Although there is a long history of designing authenticated
key exchange protocols and many protocols have been proposed for
various kinds of distributed systems, they seldom designed for such
an imbalanced system setup.  In addition, many of them have been
found to contain flaws due to the lack of stringent security analysis.

Our proposed work can be divided into two parts due to the differences
in the underlying assumptions of the system: (1) two communicating
parties are sharing some cryptographically strong keys or some
public-key infrastructure is present, and (2) the parties only
share a password drawn from a space which is so small that an
adversary might be able to enumerate all possible passwords offline.
In this proposal, efficient and secure schemes under the first
assumption will be presented and an appropriate communication model
for security analysis will be described.  Under the second assumption,
a secure generic scheme and an efficient instantiation based on RSA
will be proposed.


Advisor: Agnes Chan
Committee Members: Burt Kaliski, Guevara Noubir, Rajmohan Rajaraman