Measurable security through isotropic channels (transcript of discussion)

Abstract

I may be in trouble because I actually wrote my talk, but I wrote it on the aeroplane so maybe that gives me some credit. The first thing you learn in any crypto class is that you really don't want to trust the communication medium, instead you want to encrypt all of your information end-to-end, and this is really the first lesson that everybody is taught, and it's also a lesson we're going to ignore today. So rather than rely on end-to-end cryptography we're going to rely on the environment itself for confidentiality. Why in the world would we want to do this, well what I'm going to talk about is this isotropic technique, which provides some interesting advantages like it has inherent man-in-the-middle prevention, and protection, it's computational crypto, so it's provable and measurable relating to today's theme. And also relating to today's theme, there's strong confidentiality, even when some assumptions are violated, so it really scales gracefully, and it's really hard to break the protocols even if the assumptions are only mostly, and not completely, correct. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.