Steganography and collusion in cryptographic protocols

Steganography, the hiding of covert messages inside innocuous communication, is an active area of cryptographic research. Recent research has shown that provably undetectable steganography is possible in a wide variety of settings. We believe that the existence of such undetectable steganography will have far reaching implications. In this thesis, we investigate the impact of steganography on the design of cryptographic protocols. In particular, we show that that all existing cryptographic protocols allow malicious players to collude and coordinate their actions by steganographicly hiding covert messages inside legitimate protocol traffic. Such collusion is devastating in many settings, and thus we argue that it's elimination is an important direction for cryptographic research. Defeating such steganographic collusion requires not only new cryptographic protocols, but also a new notion of protocol security. Traditional notions of protocol security attempt to minimize the injuries to privacy and correctness inflicted by malicious participants who collude during run-time. They do not, however, prevent malicious parties from colluding and coordinating their actions in the first place! We therefore put forward the notion of a collusion-free protocol which guarantees that no set of players can use the protocol to maliciously coordinate their actions.

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

• Lepinski, Matthew (Matthew Baker), 1978-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Silvio Micali.

• 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/1721.1/38309

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/38309