Computer Science Colloquia
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Stefano Tessaro
Host: abhi shelat
3:30 PM, Rice Hall, Room 130 (auditorium), followed by a reception in Rice Hall Fourth Floor Atrium (west end)
Theoretical Foundations for Applied Cryptography
ABSTRACT
My talk explains that obtaining quality applied cryptography
(i.e., with the desired combination of security assurance and
performance) requires significant and deep advances in theory. I will
discuss three illustrative examples.
First, I will present my results on a process called security
amplification that may be used to make block ciphers (the workhorses of
modern cryptography under which encryption is ubiquitously performed)
more secure against cryptanalysis.
Second, I will introduce my theory of multi-instance security, which may
be applied to provide the first theoretical analysis of the
effectiveness of the classical practice of password salting.
Third, I will bridge a 35-year gap between the information& coding
community and the cryptography community by providing cryptographic
foundations, as well as schemes with optimal parameters, for private
communication based solely on the assumption that the communication
channel from sender to adversary is noisier than the one from sender to
receiver. The resulting schemes, being keyless, are particularly
attractive in wireless communication scenarios.
Biosketch: Stefano Tessaro is currently a research scientist in the
Cryptography and Information Security group at MIT CSAIL. He received
his MSc and PhD from ETH Zurich in 2005 and 2010, respectively. From
2010 to 2012, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of
California, San Diego. His research interests are in cryptography and
its connections to theoretical computer science and information theory.
*Mr. Tessaro is a faculty candidate for the Department of Computer Science.