Abstract

A big challenge in pervasive computing is to establish secure communication over the Dolev-Yao network without a PKI . An approach studied by researchers is to build security though human work creating a low-bandwidth empirical channel (physical contact, human conversation) where the transmitted information is authentic and cannot be faked /modified. In this talk, we give a brief survey of authentication protocols of this type as well as concentrating on our contribution which is group-protocol.

We start with non-interactive schemes, for example: the one proposed by Gehrmann, Mitchell and Nyberg, and point out that it does not optimise the human work, and then present our improved version of the scheme. We then move on to analyse strategies used to build interactive pair-wise and group protocols that minimise the human work relative to the amount of security obtained. Many of the protocols are based on the human comparison of a single short string.

Speaker’s website: http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/long.nguyen/