How To Build an Insecure System Out of Perfectly Good Cryptography

Our speaker for our February Blockchain@UBC Monthly Research Talk is Dr. Radia Perlman. Dr Perlman's work has had a profound impact on how computer networks work today. It enables huge networks, like the Internet, to be robust, scalable, and largely self-managing. Her technology also transformed Ethernet from a technology that could support a few hundred nodes within a building, into a technology that could support networks of hundreds of thousands of nodes. She has also made important contributions in network security, including robustness despite malicious trusted participants, assured delete, key management for data at rest encryption, DDOS defense, and user authentication. She is currently a Fellow at Dell EMC, and has taught as adjunct faculty at MIT, Harvard, and University of Washington. She wrote the textbook "Interconnections", and co-wrote the textbook "Network Security". She holds over 100 issued patents. She has received numerous awards including induction into the Inventor Hall of Fame, lifetime achievement awards from ACM's SIGCOMM and Usenix, election to National Academy of Engineering, induction into the Internet Hall of Fame, and an honorary doctorate from KTH. She has a PhD in Computer Science from MIT.

Dr. Perlman's talk will address the following: Standards organizations focus on syntax of messages. Academics focus on cryptographic algorithms with provable security. However, there are a lot of system issues that are left undefined, and lead to insecure systems. This talk will cover a variety of examples, for instance, misuse of web cookies, trust models for PKI, combining two systems that, although independently secure, create an insecure system when merged.