Cryptocracy

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This week’s guest is Ian Goldberg with whom we discuss his observations on the evolution of the field of Privacy Enhancing Technologies and his recent work in the sub-field of Private Information Retrieval.

I also narrate this week's Anonymity Bibliography paper of the week: Compact E-Cash, by  Jan Camenisch, Susan Hohenberger, and Anna Lysyanskaya. (BibTeX) (PDF)

Acknowledgements

Musical segue: Nightcrawler	CJACKS via Podsafe Audio
Album photograph by	Jacob Appelbaum

This week on the Cryptocracy podcast we interview Karsten Nohl about his joint work with Henryk Plötz on their recent break of the Mifare proprietary cipher known as “Crypto 1”. We also perform a narration of The Pynchon Gate: A Secure Method of Pseudonymous Mail Retrieval by Len Sassaman, Bram Cohen, and Nick Mathewson.

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Episode Details and other formats

The program

• Announcements
• This week’s guest: Karsten Nohl on the Mifare Crypto 1 break
• Anonymity Bibliography Paper of the week: The Pynchon Gate: A Secure Method of Pseudonymous Mail Retrieval

This Week’s Guest

This week’s guest is Karsten Nohl, a Ph. D. candidate in the computer science department of the University of Virginia. Karsten was kind enough to speak with us about joint work with Henryk Plötz regarding their analysis of the Mifare Crypto 1 cipher.

More information about the Mifare Crypto 1 (“Mifare classic crypto”) analysis including video footage of the 24c3 presentation is available on Hack A Day.

This Week’s Announcements

W2SP 2008: Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2008
When: May 22, 2008
Submission Deadline: March 7, 2008
Where: Co-located with IEEE S&P, Oakland, CA, USA
What: “The goal of this one day workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding Web 2.0 security and privacy issues, and establishing new collaborations in these areas.”

Fourth International Summer School:
The Future of Identity in the Information Society – Challenges for Privacy and Security FIDIS/IFIP Internet Security & Privacy Summer School 2008
When: 1-7 September 2008
Submission Deadline: April 28, 2008
Where: Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Rep
What: “The increasing diversity of Information & Communication Technologies and their equally diverse range of uses in personal, professional and official capacities raise challenging questions of identity in a variety of contexts. What constitutes an identity, how do new technologies affect identity, how do we manage identities in a globally networked information society?”

2008 USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop
When: July 28-29, 2008
Submission Deadline: March 28, 2008
Where: San Jose, CA, USA
What: “EVT '08 seeks to bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines, ranging from computer science and human-computer interaction experts through political scientists, legal experts, election administrators, and voting equipment vendors. EVT seeks to publish original research on important problems in all aspects of electronic voting.”

If you are going to be in Barcelona in March, hurry up and register for PKC 2008: The 11th International Workshop on Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptography. The late registration deadline is almost upon us, as it falls on February 13th.

Tune in next week for an interview with Ian Goldberg, author of many great papers including “Improving the Robustness of Private Information Retrieval” which was featured on last week’s program.

Anonymity Bibliography Paper of the week
The Pynchon Gate: A Secure Method of Pseudonymous Mail Retrieval [Anonbib entry][Bibtex]
By Len Sassaman, Bram Cohen, and Nick Mathewson

Other papers mentioned in this week’s episode
Security Analysis of a Cryptographically-Enabled RFID Device [Bibtex]
By S. Bono, M. Green, A. Stubblefield, A. Juels, A. Rubin, and M. Szydlo

Acknowledgements

First musical segue: Here I am	EVERYDAY JONES via Podsafe Audio
Second musical segue: Safe Primes	Cryptocrat
Midi sequence of safe primes taken from	http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/table?a=5385&fmt=6
Shortwave radio samples taken from	galeku via the freesound project
Album photograph by	Jacob Appelbaum

Subscribe to the Cryptocracy Podcast

This week I am starting a weekly podcast: The Cryptocracy Podcast brings you news, announcements, interviews, and narration of paper abstracts on privacy enhancing technologies, cryptography, security, and electronic society.

In this first episode I reading some abstracts from the Freehaven anonymity bibliography of which I am an editor.  The papers I have selected this week span a variety of topics in privacy enhancing technology, and were published within the past two years. 

Please make requests for future podcast episodes by sending me email (tshb@acm.org) or by leaving a comment here on my blog.  I rely on you to suggest interviews you would like to hear, abstracts or venues you would like me to cover, or other things you would like to hear.

I also invite contributions.  If you are interested in speaking on my show please contact me.

Download the Cryptocracy Podcast episode 001 as a VBR MP3, or Cryptocracy Podcast in other formats.

A list of papers mentioned in this week's podcast after the jump.

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Nymble: Anonymous IP-address Blocking (PDF)
by Peter C. Johnson, Apu Kapadia, Patrick P. Tsang, and Sean W. Smith.
In the Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET 2007), Ottawa, Canada, June 2007. (BibTeX entry)·

Describes Nymble, a system that allows services to block anonymous users that misbehave, without making their transactions linkable.

The Economics of Mass Surveillance and the Questionable Value of Anonymous Communications (PDF) (Cached: PDF)
by George Danezis and Bettina Wittneben.
In the Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS 2006), Cambridge, UK, June 2006. (BibTeX entry)·

Locating Hidden Servers (PDF) (Cached: PDF)
by Lasse Øverlier and Paul Syverson.
In the Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2006. (BibTeX entry)·

Motivates and describes Tor's entry guard design.

How to win the clonewars: efficient periodic n-times anonymous authentication (PDF) (Cached: PDF)
by Jan Camenisch, Susan Hohenberger, Markulf Kohlweiss, Anna Lysyanskaya, and Mira Meyerovich.
In the Proceedings of the 13th ACM conference on Computer and communications security (CCS 2006), Alexandria, Virginia, USA, 2006, pages 201-210. (BibTeX entry)·

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Download the Cryptocracy Podcast episode 001 as a VBR MP3, or Cryptocracy Podcast in other formats.</div>