[Colloq] Duncan Wong PhD defense, Monday, July 22

[Rajmohan Rajaraman]

Monday, July 22, 2002
10:30am
149 Cullinane Hall


Duncan S. Wong
Ph.D. Thesis Defense
"On the Design and Analysis of Authenticated Key Exchange Schemes
for Low Power Wireless Computing Platforms"


ABSTRACT

The goal of an authenticated key exchange (AKE) 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.

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,
that is dictionary attack.

In the talk, our AKE schemes designed under the first assumption
will be reviewed briefly.  It is followed by the description of a
generic password-based AKE scheme devised under the second assumption.
The scheme can be shown to be secure against offline dictionary attack
under the random oracle model and can be instantiated efficiently using
RSA.  We evaluate the performance of this RSA-based password scheme when
implemented on low-power devices such as PalmPilots.  Finally we show
that it is faster than all the previously proposed RSA-based schemes and
is among the fastest password-based AKE schemes currently known.

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