Stanislaw Jarecki, Secret Handshakes

Secret Handshake is an authentication protocol with non-standard and strong anonymity property: Namely, the secrecy of the *affiliations* (i.e. the certificates) of party A who engages in this authentication protocol with party B will be protected against any B* (i.e. a malicious party which pretends to be B) who does not meet A's authentication criteria. This strong secrecy and anonymity protection turns out to be possible, and quite efficiently so, based on various standard cryptographic assumptions. The talk will give an overview of the problem, the various solutions, and the several efficiency and security issues involved in making such anonymous authentication schemes practical. About the speaker: Stanislaw Jarecki is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. He is working on cryptography and fault tolerant distributed protocols. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at MIT in 2001. His thesis work was on threshold protocols, which are protocols that enable shared computation of cryptographic functions in a distributed setting. Between MIT and UCI, Stanislaw worked as a researcher at Intertrust and then as a postdoc in the cryptography and security group at Stanford. His current work includes threshold protocols, affiliation-privacy in authentication protocols, robust cryptographic protocols, and theoretical issues like secure 2-party computation.