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                   B O S T O N   U N I V E R S I T Y
                                       
                      Computer Science Department
                                       
                          C O L L O Q U I U M

               Distributed, Multi-Party Security Policies

                             Trevor Jim 

	    	      University of Pennsylvania 

 			   Friday, April 23
                                       
                                11:00am
                       (Coffee served at 10:45am)

                                       
                         Seminar Room / MCS 135
                                       

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    Any large scale security architecture that uses certificates to
    provide security in a network will need both a system for verifying
    and evaluating certificates, and a system for moving certificates
    around in the network.  We have designed a system, QCM, that
    integrates the two.  The key to the design is a high-level language
    for security policies that does not require knowledge of cryptographic
    primitives or protocols -- the policy writer does not have to write
    code to verify signatures or send messages.  Instead, these tasks are
    handled by the QCM engine: given a policy, QCM automatically derives a
    protocol that verifies local certificates and obtains remote
    certificates as necessary to evaluate the policy.

    We have experimented with a wide variety of strategies for obtaining
    remote certificates, including query/response protocols, mirroring
    of security repositories, and integration with COTS databases.  We
    are also able to handle both online and offline signatures,
    transparently to the user.  In this talk I will demonstrate the
    system and discuss our efforts to deploy QCM as a security
    infrastructure on the active network backbone.

    
    Host: Mark Crovella (crovella@cs.bu.edu)

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For colloquium info, including directions, see http://cs-www.bu.edu/colloquium
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