DEPARTMENT SEMINAR

Gildas Avoine
MIT
Cryptography and Information Security Group (CIS Group)

Thursday, January 25, 2007
Computer Science Building, Room 151
2:00 PM

Faculty Host: Kevin Fu

"Can we use proxy-readers to relieve back-end RFID systems?"

Privacy and efficiency are incompatible properties in low-cost RFID. Indeed, in symmetric cryptography based authentication systems, the complexity to authenticate privately a prover is linear in the number of provers belonging to the system. Tentative solutions have been suggested to reduce complexity, but it is always against a cost in terms of privacy.

This talk introduces the concept of proxy readers, that is to say readers that carry out the authentication themselves without querying online the back-end system. The open question consists in determining whether (and how) the required security properties can be achieved in such an architecture.

So this presentation suggests a new approach to overcome the privacy/efficiency issue, but it does not bring any solution yet. It gives free rein to our imagination!

Gildas Avoine is Postdoctorate Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), in the Cryptography and Information Security Group. He received a BA in Mathematics and a MA in Computer Sciences from the university of Caen (France), and a PhD in Cryptography from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (Switzerland).

Gildas considers various aspects of information security and cryptography from both theoretical and practical viewpoints. His research focuses on cryptographic protocols, especially authentication protocols in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). His work covers attacks on existing protocols, design of new protocols, definition of adversary models, and is also concerned with privacy issues.