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SUMMARY:Anti-surveillance: Can Applied Cryptography\, Law Enforcement\, an
 d Formal Methods be Friends? - Dr. Markulf Kohlweiss\, Microsoft Research\
 , Cambridge
DTSTART:20170620T130000Z
DTEND:20170620T140000Z
UID:TALK72922@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Laurent Simon
DESCRIPTION:*Abstract:*\n\nIn recent decades\, intelligence\, law-enforcem
 ent\, business\, and political organizations have developed a growing depe
 ndence on data. In the words of the NSA there is a desire to ‘sniff it a
 ll\, collect it all\, know It all\, process it all\, exploit it all’. Ed
 ward Snowden claimed that cryptography has a unique role in preventing thi
 s excessive collection. But what kind of cryptography has seen an increase
  in deployment? Which is still floundering and for what reasons? I will lo
 ok at these questions by relating them to two of my research interests: an
 onymous credentials and the TLS protocol. \n\n* Anonymous credentials and 
 e-cash\, conceived in the 80’s and later the topic of my PhD\, did not s
 ee broad deployment. With the success of bit-coin and theoretical breakthr
 oughs in zero-knowledge arguments the deployment of fully anonymous crypto
 -currencies is now for the first time explored by the Zcash alt-coin. \n\n
 * The TLS protocol is the cryptographic work horse of the internet and is 
 today used to encrypt more than half of internet traffic. This has put inc
 reased stress on its performance and security as its crumbling cryptograph
 y was optimized and patched. This in turn has led to the development of ne
 w cryptographic algorithms and the new TLS 1.3 standard. I will talk about
  the efforts of the Everest project to formally verify these.\n\nThese two
  areas are very different\, but they both feed into fears of law enforceme
 nt of ‘going dark’ and new calls for key escrow. I will argue that a p
 rincipled stance on preventing key escrow and trapdoors backed up by forma
 l and cryptographic analysis is necessary to prevent slipping back into th
 e routine subversion of cryptographic protections of the pre-Snowden days.
  At the same time\, I offer a compromise: A novel mechanism that enables t
 argeted surveillance while enforcing hard limitations on its scope in a pu
 blicly verifiable way.\n\n*Bio:*\n\nDr. Markulf Kohlweiss is a researcher 
 at Microsoft Research Cambridge in the Programming Principles and Tools gr
 oup. He did his PhD at the COSIC (Computer Security and Industrial Cryptog
 raphy) group at the K.U. Leuven\, and his master thesis at IBM Research Zu
 rich. Dr. Kohlweiss' research focus is on privacy-enhancing cryptography a
 nd formal reasoning about cryptographic protocols. More specifically\, he 
 examines the interplay of cryptography and real-world security systems thr
 ough collaborative projects on verifiable computation and SSL/TLS. For the
  latter he is a co-recipient of the Levchin Prize awarded to the miTLS tea
 m.
LOCATION:LT2\, Computer Laboratory\, William Gates Building
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