Susan Landau on crypto policy

Christof Paar christof at ece.WPI.EDU
Tue Oct 31 09:13:50 PST 2000


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

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		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 at ece.wpi.edu
fax: (508) 831 5491    www:   http://ee.wpi.edu/People/faculty/cxp.html
***********************************************************************


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experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'





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