COLLOQUIUM
         Computer Science Department, Boston University

Speaker: Ran Canetti
         IBM Research and MIT

Date:  Wednesday, December 8, 2004
Time:  3pm
Place: MCS 135 (for directions, see www.cs.bu.edu/colloquium)

Title: Security and Composition of Cryptographic Protocols

Abstract:

What does it mean for a cryptographic protocol to be "secure"?
Capturing the security requirements of cryptographic tasks in
a meaningful yet realizable way is a slippery business: Protocols
have been proven "secure", standardized, deployed, and later broken.
Indeed, even today, after more than two decades of study, the above
question remains a central focal point of cryptographic research.

We will present some of the difficulties in coming up with viable
notions of security, as well as some efforts to tackle this problem.
Special emphasis will be put on the inherent need to guarantee security
even when a protocol runs alongside (i.e., is composed with) other
protocols, on the need to capture security that holds only against
computationally bounded adversaries, and on the often subtle
interplay between the two.

The talk will be self-contained and will not require cryptographic
background.


Short biography:


Dr. Ran Canetti graduated from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel,
in 1995. He is currently a Research Staff Memeber at the Cryptography group,
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and a Visiting Associate Professor at the
CS and AI Lab at MIT. His research interests lie in cryptography and network
security, with emphasis on cryptographic protocols and their security analysis.
His current activities include chairing the Multicast Security working group
and the Crypto Forum research group of the Internet Engineering Task Force.
He is also an Associate Editor of the Journal of Cryptology.