Date: April 1, 1999
Time: Noon
Place: Wean Hall 8220

Speaker: Sugih Jamin, University of Michigan

Windowed Key Revocation in Public Key Infrastructures

Abstract:
The advent of electronic commerce and personal communications on the Internet heightens concerns over the lack of privacy and security. Network services providing a wide range of security related guarantees are increasingly based on public key certificates. A fundamental problem inhibiting the wide acceptance of existing certificate distribution services is the lack of a scalable certificate revocation mechanism. We argue in this paper that the resource requirements of extant revocation mechanisms place significant burden on certificate servers and network resources. We propose a novel mechanism called Windowed Revocation that satisfies the security policies and requirements of existing mechanisms and, at the same time, reduces the burden on certificate servers and network resources. We include a proof of correctness of windowed revocation and a trace-based performance study illustrating the scalability and general applicability of windowed revocation.

Bio:
Sugih Jamin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 1996 for his work on measurement-based admission control algorithms. He spent parts of 1992 and 1993 at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. His additional research interests include self-organizing network services, market-based resource allocation, network topology discovery and traffic characterization. He received the ACM SIGCOMM Best Student Paper Award in 1995, the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in 1997, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 1998, all for his work in admission control algorithms.

SDI / LCS Seminar Questions?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/