8:30-9:15 Registration and breakfast
 

9:15 Opening remarks
 

9:30-10:30 Keynote talk: Living With Personal Surveillance. Ed Felten, Princeton University.

10:30-11:00 Coffee break.
 

11:00-11:30 Cryptology and non-computer security. Matt Blaze, AT&T Labs-Research.

Abstract: Computer security and cryptology takes much of its basic philosophy and language from the world of mechanical locks, and yet we often ignore the possibility that physical security systems might suffer from the same kinds of attacks that plague computers and networks. This talk examines mechanical locks from a computer scientist's viewpoint. We describe attacks for amplifying rights in mechanical pin tumbler locks that are at least as serious as those that can occur in computing systems. We end with future directions for research in this area and the suggestion that mechanical locks are worthy objects of our attention and scrutiny.

11:30-12:00 Privacy-protecting statistics computation: theory and practice. Rebecca Wright, Stevens Institute of Technology.

Abstract: Suppose a client wishes to compute some aggregate statistics on a privately-owned data base. The data owner wants to protect the privacy of the personal information in the data base, while the client does not want to reveal his selection criteria. Privacy-protecting statistical analysis allows the client and data owner to interact in such a way that the client learns the desired aggregate statistics, but does not learn anything further about the data; the data owner leans nothing about the client's query. Motivated by this application, we consider the more general problem of "selective private function evaluation," in which a client can privately compute an arbitrary function over a database. I will present various approaches for constructing efficient selective private function evaluation protocols, both for the general problem and for privacy-protecting statistical analysis. I will also discuss our prototype implementation of some of these protocols and our initial experimental results.

12:00-12:30 Flexible Regulation of Distributed Coalitions. Naftaly Minsky, Rutgers University.

Abstract: There is a growing tendency for organizations to form coalitions in order to collaborate--by sharing some of their resources, or by coordinating some of their activities. The question addressed in this paper is: how should such coalitions be regulated? Our approach to this question is based on the following definition of the governance of coalitions: A coalition C is a set {E1,..., En} of enterprises, which interoperate under an ensemble of policies [PC, {Pi}], where PC is the coalition policy that governs the coalition as a whole, and Pi is the local policy of enterprise Ei (for each i), which governs its participation in the coalition. This means, in particular, that every interaction between an agent xi of enterprise Ei and an agent xj of Ej must comply with the local policies Pi and Pj , as well as with the coalition policy PC. We also require that the policy-ensemble [PC, {Pi}] of a coalition would satisfy the following principle of flexibility: Each local policy Pi can be defined and changed independently of other local policies in this ensemble, and without any knowledge of them. We will describe a regulatory mechanism for coalitions, which provides for efficient and decentralized enforcement of a wide range of policies that might govern a coalition, and which satisfies our principle of flexibility.

12:30-2:00 Lunch.
 

2:00-3:00 Keynote Talk: Toward fixing the "compliance defects" of public key cryptography. Michael Reiter, Carnegie Mellon University.

Abstract: User interaction with a security mechanism is an often overlooked aspect of secure system design, but also one that can be critical to the proper operation of the system. In a 1996 paper, Davis argued that certain rules of operation thrust upon users by public key cryptographic systems are both difficult for users to follow and impossible for administrators to enforce. He predicted that such rules of operation, which he termed "compliance defects", would pose barriers to adoption or lead to breaches of security. In this talk we examine several compliance defects in the context of public key cryptographic systems and survey research conducted in the last several years that offer new alternatives to address them. A theme in this work is developing technologies to present security-relevant tasks to users in ways that are more consistent with human nature.

3:00-3:30 Coffee break.
 

3:30-4:00 Dependent session types for safety in distributed communications. Adriana Compagnoni, Stevens Institute of Technology.

Abstract: We define a type system for distributed and concurrent communication combining session types and correspondence assertions. The dependent session types calculus that we obtain is more expressive than the union of its subsystems. While session types allow us to describe the input/output synchronization between processes, and correspondence assertions allow us to ensure that certain code has been executed before other code, enforcing a communication protocol, dependent session types allow us not only to ensure that two processes communicated, but to guarantee the integrity of the information being exchanged. The resulting type system augments session types with effects and thus yields types which may depend on messages read/written prior within the same session. We prove that evaluation preserves typability and that well-typed processes are safe.

This is joint work with Eduardo Bonelli (Stevens) and Elsa Gunter (NJIT).

4:00-4:30 Autonomic Security: Compromise Tolerant Distribution, Compromise Detection, Compromise Recovery. Tal Rabin, IBM Hawthorne Research.

Abstract: Large, widely-used distributed systems, such as the Internet, present a security challenge due to their size and to potential vulnerabilities of their components. Methods to eliminate or shield vulnerabilities, such as preventing/repairing faulty code or using firewalls, provide some level of security, but they need to be complemented by means for recovering from break-ins. In order to achieve this, we can utilize the distributed structure of the system to enhance its security.

In this talk we will describe methods for distributing data and cryptographic applications, such as digital signatures. We will further show how these methods can increase the security of a distributed system.

4:30-5:00 Type-Based Distributed Access Control. Tom Chothia, Stevens Institute of Technology.

Abstract: The term distributed access control is used here to refer to a weak form of information flow control, one that ensures that access control restrictions on data are propagated to all the places where it is accessed in a distributed system. The motivation for DAC is accountability: building an audit trail based on accesses to data. The key to making this practical is performing the access checks statically, at compile-time.

Various forms of type-based access control and information flow control require that network security be maintained by the runtime rather than the application. This is because the guarantees of the information flow might otherwise be violated by unsafe communication. This talk presents the Key-based Decentralized Label Model (KDLM), an approach to extending a type system for distributed access control to a typed API for cryptographic operations, that ensures that the access control restrictions are preserved by the application's use of cryptography to secure communications. The notion of declassification certificates is introduced to support the declassification of encrypted data.

This is joint work with Dominic Duggan (Stevens) and Jan Vitek (Purdue University).

5:00 Concluding remarks.