New foundations for efficient authentication, commutative cryptography, and private disjointness testing

This dissertation presents new constructions and security definitions related to three areas: authentication, cascadable and commutative crytpography, and private set operations. Existing works relevant to each of these areas fall into one of two categories: efficient solutions lacking formal proofs of security or provably-secure, but highly inefficient solutions. This work will bridge this gap by presenting new constructions and definitions that are both practical and provably-secure. The first contribution in the area of efficient authentication is a provably-secure authentication protocol named HB+. The HB+ protocol is efficient enough to be implemented on extremely low-cost devices, or even by a patient human with a coin to flip. The security of HB+ is based on the hardness of a long-standing learning problem that is closely related to coding theory. HB+ is the first authentication protocol that is both practical for low-cost devices, like radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, and provably secure against active adversaries. The second contribution of this work is a new framework for defining and proving the security of cascadable cryptosystems, specifically commutative cryptosystems.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Weis, Stephen August, 1978-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Ronald L. Rivest.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37842

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/37842