Computer Security and
Cryptography
Reading Group
April 2002 List
Date &
Location |
Reading |
Apr. 5, 2002
1304 CS
1:30 - 2:30 PM
|
Alma Whitten, J.D. Tygar
Carnegie Mellon University / University of California, Berkeley
Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A
Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0
URL: http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/whitten99why.html
User errors cause or contribute to
most computer security failures, yet
user interfaces for security still tend
to be clumsy, confusing, or
near-nonexistent. Is this simply due to
a failure to apply standard user
interface design techniques to security?
We argue that, on the contrary,
effective security requires a different
usability standard, and that it will not
be achieved through the user interface
design techniques appropriate to other
types of consumer software.
To test this hypothesis, we performed
a case study of a security program which
does have a good user interface by
general standards: PGP 5.0. Our case
study used a cognitive walkthrough
analysis together with a laboratory user
test to evaluate whether PGP 5.0 can be
successfully used by cryptography
novices to achieve effective electronic
mail security. The analysis found a
number of user interface design flaws
that may contribute to security
failures, and the user test demonstrated
that when our test participants were
given 90 minutes in which to sign and
encrypt a message using PGP 5.0, the
majority of them were unable to do so
successfully.
We conclude that PGP 5.0 is not
usable enough to provide effective
security for most computer users,
despite its attractive graphical user
interface, supporting our hypothesis
that user interface design for effective
security remains an open problem. We
close with a brief description of our
continuing work on the development and
application of user interface design
principles and techniques for
security.
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Apr. 12, 2002
1304 CS
1:30 - 2:30 PM
|
Secure Minicomputer Operating System (KSOS)
URL: http://seclab.cs.ucdavis.edu/projects/history/papers/ford78.pdf
KSOS is the
Kernelized Secure Operating System
designed for DARPA. KSOS is required to
be externally compatible with UNIX, to
be efficient, to satisfy certain
multilevel security requirements, and to
be demonstrably secure.
|
Apr. 19, 2002
1304 CS
1:30 - 2:30 PM
|
Peter Gutmann
Department of Computer Science,
University of Auckland
Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory
URL: http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/sec96/gutmann.html
With the use of
increasingly sophisticated encryption
systems, an attacker wishing to gain
access to sensitive data is forced to
look elsewhere for information. One
avenue of attack is the recovery of
supposedly erased data from magnetic
media or random-access memory. This
paper covers some of the methods
available to recover erased date and
presents schemes to make this recovery
significantly more difficult.
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Apr. 26, 2002
1304 CS
1:30 - 2:30 PM
|
Frank Stajano, Ross Anderson
University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
The Cocaine Auction Protocol: On The Power Of Anonymous Broadcast
URL: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/cocaine.pdf
Traditionally,
cryptographic protocols are described as
a sequence of steps, in each of which
one principal sends a message to
another. It is assumed that the
fundamental communication primitive is
necessarily one-to-one, so protocols
addressing anonymity tend to resort to
the composition of multiple elementary
transmissions in order to frustrate
trac analysis.
This paper builds on
a case study, of an anonymous auction
between mistrustful principals with no
trusted arbitrator, to introduce
"anonymous broadcast" as a new protocol
building block. This primitive is, in
many interesting cases, a more accurate
model of what actually happens during
transmission. With certain restrictions
it can give a particularly ecient
implementation technique for many
anonymity-related protocols.
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