Computer Security and Cryptography Reading Group
May 2006 List

M. Handley

URL: http://tapir.cs.ucl.ac.uk/bittau-wep.pdf

The 802.11 encryption standard Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is still widely used today despite the numerous discussions on its insecurity. In this paper, we present a novel vulnerability which allows an attacker to send arbitrary data on a WEP network after having eavesdropped a single data packet. Furthermore, we present techniques for real-time decryption of data packets, which may be used under common circumstances. Vendor produced mitigation techniques which cause frequent WEP re-keying prevent traditional attacks, whereas our attack remains effective even in such scenarios.

We implemented a fully automatic version of this attack which demonstrates its practicality and feasibility in real networks. As even rapidly re-keyed networks can be quickly compromised, we believe WEP must now be abandoned rather than patched yet again.

J. Bethencourt

D. Song

B. Waters

URL: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bethenco/searcheff.pdf

A system for private stream searching allows a client to retrieve documents matching some search criteria from a remote server while the server evaluating the request remains provably oblivious to the search criteria. In this extended abstract, we give a high level outline of a new scheme for this problem and an experimental analysis of its scalability. The new scheme is highly efficient in practice. We demonstrate the practical applicability of the scheme by considering its performance in the demanding scenario of providing a privacy preserving version of the Google News Alerts service.