Thursday, March 31, 4:15pm, room 9204/9205
Adam L. Young
(Senior Managing Consultant, LECG LLC)
"Questionable Encryptions and Intractable Evidence Collection"
This talk will cover investigations into how cryptography can enhance
the privacy of malicious software attacks. An unorthodox view is adopted
that the attacker is the `good guy' and that law enforcement is the `bad
guy.' We consider a malicious program that asymmetrically encrypts host
plaintext data and then covertly broadcasts the result for
reconnaissance by the attacker. We formally define the notion of a
questionable encryption scheme that can be used in this attack. The user
of a questionable encryption scheme chooses to generate a real or fake
public key and conveys this choice to the key generation algorithm. The
output is a witness and either a real or fake key pair. If the public
key is `real' then it produces decipherable encryptions and the
poly-sized witness proves this. If the key is generated to be `fake'
then it produces indecipherable encryptions (even when the private key
is available) and the poly-sized witness proves this. Without knowledge
of the witness it is intractable to distinguish between the two types of
public keys. A construction is presented for a questionable encryption
scheme that is based on the Goldwasser-Micali cryptosystem. The security
is proven based on the difficulty of distinguishing quadratic residues
from pseudosquares modulo pq. When applied to the attack, the attacker
retains the exclusive ability to reveal whether or not the program in
fact steals data and the attack shows that malicious programs that
appear to compute asymmetric encryptions may in fact not. This topic is
briefly covered in the book "Malicious Cryptography" and this is joint
work with Moti Yung.
The Colloquium is supported by generous
contributions from the Bloomberg, Information Builders, Inc. and qbt Systems, Inc.
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