WPI Cryptography Seminar January 20

[Berk]

                       WPI Cryptography Seminar

               Towards a Theory of Variable Privacy

                  BY: Dr. Poorvi Vora,
                      Hewlett-Packard Company,
                      Corvallis, OR
                DATE: Monday, January 20, 2003
                TIME: 10:00 AM
               PLACE: Atwater Kent, Room 218


                             ABSTRACT

The traditional theory of security, with its focus on perfect secrecy,
does not provide a satisfactory framework for the study of situations
where information revelation bears a privacy cost and also provides a
benefit. We define variable privacy as the use of randomization with user
participation in the choice of parameters, and propose the beginnings of a
theory for its study. Variable privacy enables the user, or a
computational agent working on the user's behalf, to choose a level of
interaction, based on a personal cost-benefit analysis of an instance of
information revelation.

Our theory is based on treating the randomization protocol as a channel
for the information to be protected. We demonstrate a one-to-one
correspondence between channel codes and a certain class of attacks.
Shannon's theorems show the existence of very special attacks, and upper
bounds on their efficiency. We use the bounds to motivate a privacy
measure of randomization similar to one proposed the database literature,
and thus provide connections between the theory of security and
statistical privacy protection techniques.

We are not aware of any other work that uses Shannon's theorems to
construct the special attacks on cryptographic protocols. We are also not
aware of any other work that connects error-correcting codes to attacks on
randomization.


 DIRECTIONS:

 The WPI Cryptoseminar is being held in the Atwater Kent building on
 the WPI campus. 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.


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 Regards,


 Berk Sunar and Bill Martin


______________________________________________________________

  Berk Sunar,                             Assistant Professor
  Electrical & Computer Eng. Dept.         Ph (508) 831 54 94
  Worcester Polytechnic Institute          Fx (508) 831 54 91
  http://www.wpi.edu/~sunar
  http://ece.wpi.edu/research/crypt/          CRIS Laboratory
______________________________________________________________

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The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
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