Design and Analysis of Security Protocols

Abstract: Consider the following situations.

Situation A: Alice walks into Manneys Bookstore and buys a book Alice picks up the book, the book seller gets hard cash. Simple.

Situation B: Bob goes to amazon.com and buys a book. The situation is worrisome. Did Eve eavesdrop and discover Bob's credit card number? Was Bob really talking to Amazon? What happens if Amazon charges Bob and refuses to deliver the book? What if Bob gets the book and tells Amazon that he didnt, and then asks Amazon to compensate him.

Since billions of dollars change hands on the Internet, we care about the answer to these questions. There are very few situations in computer science where researchers have proposed 3 line solutions, which there colleagues have looked at and approved, and then a few years later someone discovers that the solution is incorrect. I hope to convice you why analyzing three-seven line protocols is a respectable profession – these protocols fail in very intricate ways.

There are three aspects to security – the cryptography, the abstract protocol and the implementation. I focus on the second one and discuss connections to the other aspects. This is a current, important and mathametically interesting field of research.

Teacher's Introduction: Mukund Sundararajan did his M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University and is currently pursuing his PhD there. His main area of research is design and analysis of security protocols.

Topics: Design of protocols for contract signing, voting, secure email, wireless security, e-commerce. Protocol calculii, formal logics, finite state analysis.