Please note the different day, time, and *building* of this seminar talk. For those coming from outside: Fuller Labs is the large concrete building next to Atwater Kent. - Christof *********************************************************************** ECE GRADUATE SEMINAR TITLE: Have the Crypto Wars Been Won? PRESENTER: Dr. Susan Landau Sun Microsystems Laboratories Place: Fuller Labs, Rm 320 Date and Time: Thursday, Nov. 9, 11 AM ABSTRACT: Telecommunication has never been perfectly secure, as the Cold War culture of wiretaps and international spying taught us. Yet many of us still take our privacy for granted, even as we become ever more reliant on telephones and the Internet. The security of these transactions has become a source of wide public concern and debate. Cryptography is a solution, but because cryptography can provide perfectly concealable communications, over the last quarter century the U.S. government has sought to prevent its proliferation. As a result there have been numerous battles between academics and industry on the one hand, and the U.S. government on the other, over the publication and deployment of strong cryptographic systems. In January of this year, in a major change, the U.S. government removed a number of export restrictions on cryptography. In this talk I will put current cryptography policy in the context of decisions over the last twenty-five years, and I will discuss the legal background behind the government controls, the purpose of the export regulations, and the subtleties behind the remaining restrictions. I will examine: is the battle over, and have the crypto wars been won? BIOGRAPHY: Susan Landau is Senior Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. Before joining Sun, she was a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts and Wesleyan University, and held visiting positions at Yale, Cornell, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley. She and Whitfield Diffie have written ``Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption,'' which won 1998 Donald McGannon Communication Policy Research Award. Landau is also primary author of the 1994 Association for Computing Machinery report ``Codes, Keys, and Conflicts: Issues in US Crypto Policy.'' ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DIRECTIONS: The WPI Cryptoseminar is being held in the Atwater Kent building on the WPI campus. The Atwater Kent building is at the intersection of the extension of West Street (labeled "Private Way") and Salisbury Street. Directions to the campus can be found at http://www.wpi.edu/About/Visitors/directions.html ATTENDANCE: The seminar is open to everyone and free of charge. Simply send me a brief email if you plan to attend. TALKS IN THE FALL 2000 SEMESTER: 9/27 Christof Paar et al., WPI Elliptic Curve Cryptography on Smart Cards without Coprocessors 10/11 Prof. William Martin, WPI Introduction to resilient and correlation-immune boolean functions 10/25 Prof. Berk Sunar, WPI Implementing New Public-Key Schemes 11/9 Susan Landau, Sun Microsystems Laboratories Have the Crypto Wars Been Won? 11/22 Seth Hardy, WPI Elliptic Curve Point Counting with the CM Method in Java 12/6 Scott Guthery, Mobile-Mind Who are You? Novel Means of Human Authentication TBA Adam Woodbury, WPI Public-key Cryptography in Constraint Environments (MS Thesis presentation) See http://www.ece.WPI.EDU/Research/crypt/seminar/index.html for talk abstracts. MAILING LIST: If you want to be added to the mailing list and receive talk announcements together with abstracts, please send me a short email. Likewise, if you want to be removed from the list, just send me a short email. Regards, Christof Paar ! WORKSHOP ON CRYPTOGRAPHIC HARDWARE AND EMBEDDED SYSTEMS (CHES 2001) ! ! Paris, France, May 13-16, 2001 ! ! www.chesworkshop.org ! *********************************************************************** Christof Paar, Assistant Professor Cryptography and Information Security (CRIS) Group ECE Dept., WPI, 100 Institute Rd., Worcester, MA 01609, USA fon: (508) 831 5061 email: christof@ece.wpi.edu fax: (508) 831 5491 www: http://ee.wpi.edu/People/faculty/cxp.html *********************************************************************** For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "dcsb-request@reservoir.com" with one line of text: "help". --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'