Research Statement

The need for secure systems and improved authentication methods is growing as online transactions and identity theft increases, among other reasons. When addressing security needs, forcing applications to design around cryptographic primitives and protocols makes designing such items easier; however, disregarding common applications ’ needs and human factors can easily result in any security measure being ineffective. Implementations end up ”modifying ” the primitives or misusing them in order to fit an application, resulting in insecure designs. Also, security software and protocols often prove to be burdensome or confusing to users. My current research straddles systems and theory by considering the context of cryptographic algorithms in terms of applications ’ needs. A natural extension of my work, which I have begun to investigate, is to incorporate human factors into the design of security protocols and utilities. When designing cryptographic algorithms, the security and the efficiency of both software and hardware implementations are considered but not applications ’ needs. Examples of useful properties which are not available in existing symmetric key ciphers are the support for variable sized blocks in block ciphers and the ability to efficiently convert ciphertext resulting from encrypting data with one key to ciphertext corresponding to encrypting with another key without exposing the plaintext (a concept referred to as proxy cryptography). Where data is encrypted and decrypted in a system is also important in preventing plaintext exposure in components where attacks ar