[Colloq] Hiring Talk, Monday, 3/28/05, 2pm - Riccardo Pucella

[Rachel Kalweit]

College of Computer and Information Science Colloquium

Presents:
Riccardo Pucella
Computer Science Department, Cornell University

Who will speak on:
Reasoning about Security

Monday, March 28, 2005
2:00pm
366 West Village H
Northeastern University

Abstract:
The past decade has seen an increase in the amount of work that deals 
with security in one way or another, as it pertains, for instance, to 
communication protocols, auctions, and access to distributed
resources. There are significant challenges in developing tools and 
techniques to specify, model, and verify security properties of such 
systems. In recent years, I have focused on developing frameworks to 
better express and reason about security properties of systems in 
general, and security protocols in particular. My work starts from the 
premise that reasoning about security is really reasoning about what 
agents (including possible intruders) in a system know; most security 
properties get a natural reading in terms of knowledge. This makes 
formal theories of knowledge and uncertainty a good foundation on which 
to build frameworks for reasoning about security. In this talk, I will 
focus on some of the most interesting issues that arise in this setting. 
More specifically, I will point out some limitations of formal models of 
knowledge for security, and present techniques for overcoming these 
limitations, with the added benefit that they can model in a natural way 
adversaries with different capabilities.  I will also discuss the 
relevance of evidence when reasoning quantitatively about security, and 
show how it can be used to formally capture certain forms of knowledge 
that are difficult to express in other frameworks.

Biography:
Riccardo Pucella obtained his B.Sc. in Mathematics and M.Sc. in Computer 
Science at McGill University in Montreal, after which he joined Bell 
Labs to work on the SML/NJ compiler. He attended Cornell University a 
few years later, completing a Ph.D. in Computer Science and working with 
Joe Halpern on topics ranging from the theory of security to uncertainty 
in AI, with stints exploring programming language semantics and type 
systems. He is currently a postdoc at Cornell, working with Fred 
Schneider and trying to wrap his head around proactive obfuscation.

Host: Matthias Felleisen