Computer Security and Cryptography Seminar:
March 2004 Events

I will be giving a talk on the Weil pairing and how to compute it. The talk will be elementary and will be geared to the audience's needs/background. The talk will consist of two parts, the first one will show why the Weil pairing exists on Elliptic curves and prove some of the basic properties of the pairing. The second part will be about Miller's idea for computing the Weil pairing in randomized polynomial time. If people are interested we could also go into how such a pairing can be used to implement Identity based encryption (i.e., Dan Boneh's work.)

A difficult but common scenario in computer security is being required to place confidence in trusted software running in an untrusted environment. Remote query of a hardware-based authentication identifier is just such a scenario. Increasingly, anti-tamper and software obfuscation techniques are being employed in an attempt to achieve the level of confidence desired. Recently, the Systems Assessment and Research Center of Sandia National Laboratories evaluated one such system. This talk presents the process of the evaluation, the software's protection mechanisms and what we did to evade them. The talk concludes with some observations about anti-tamper systems, obfuscation, and attackers.

Dr. Ghormley graduated in 1991 with a B.S. with honors in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. In 1998, he obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, specializing in distributed operating systems. He is currently a Principal Member of the Technical Staff at the Systems Assessment and Research Center of Sandia National Laboratories where he is a computer security analyst.

 Cookies will be served at 3:30 PM in 2310 CS.