Information Security Seminar 

09/10/2009, 15:00 — 16:00 — Room P3.10, Mathematics Building
Ran Canetti, Tel Aviv University

How to Assert and Use Composable Security

In our increasingly on-line world, sophisticated cryptographic protocols are becoming an integral part of the fabric of society. Consequently, it is imperative to be able to rigorously specify and assert the security properties of such protocols. Still, this task has been frustratingly elusive. One main source of difficulty is that security properties of protocols are very sensitive to the specific execution environment, and in particular to the other protocols running in the same system.

This talk presents a paradigm for specifying and asserting composable security properties of protocols. These are properties that remain intact regardless of the other protocols running in the system. We review a number of advantages of this approach, including an application that allows to analyze the security of systems with unbounded number of protocol instances, in an efficient and fully automated way.