http://www.cs.cityu.edu.hk/~cryptec/cryptec.htm

AN INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP on CRYPTOGRAPHIC TECHNIQUES and E-COMMERCE, code-named CrypTEC, will be held from Monday 5 July to Thursday 8 July 1999 at City University of Hong Kong -- as part of it's 15th Anniversary Celebration.

This workshop explores cutting-edge research into security aspects of electronic commerce. It brings to Hong Kong world-class researchers in both theory and practice.

A series of tutorials and public lectures will be given by Professors Ron RIVEST (MIT), Adi SHAMIR (Weizmann, Israel), Doug TYGAR (Carnegie Mellon University and UC Berkeley), and
Eric BREWER (UC Berkeley) and his Phd students Ian GOLDBERG and David WAGNER.

RIVEST and SHAMIR are the 'R' and 'S' of the best-known most-trusted and most-commonly-used Public Key Encryption and Signature Scheme, RSA.

BREWER is founder and chief scientist of INKTOMI, creator of the super-fast search engines used by YAHOO!!, NETSCAPE, etc. to search the web.

GOLDBERG and WAGNER are well-known through their multiple appearances on the front page of the New York Times for breaking encryption schemes developed by NETSCAPE et al.

TYGAR's work in electronic commerce and computer security covers enormous ground --anonymous auctions, cryptographic postal indicia to prevent forgery, and user interfaces for
computer security-- some of which will be presented in the Workshop.

The perspective of this Workshop is that the interweaving of theoretical-computer-science and practical-systems-work is essential for electronic commerce.

All attempts to make modern E-commerce systems secure, which have not been based on theory, have been broken. A striking lesson of work on security -- to be driven home at this Workshop -- is that good encryption comes not from making encryption methods private (the business approach) but from making them public (the academic approach).

For example, the system codes broken by Goldberg and Wagner, though intended by the businesses to be kept secret, were easily decoded by these students anyway.

Counterintuitive though it may seem, security cannot be achieved by hiding encryption methods,
which only helps crooks, but by making the methods public.

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RSA enables one to do Public Key Encryption and Electronic Signatures.

Public Key Encryption enables any two users, even two users who have never met(!), to conceal
from an eavesdropper all information communicated between them.

(Imagine Alice, Bob, and Eve in a room. Alice and Bob wish to communicate secretly despite that Eve hears everything they say. It is a surprising and magnificent result of modern encryption
techniques that Alice and Bob can converse with each other in such a way that Eve understands nothing they say.  While Eve initially understands what each tells the other, she eventually is no longer able to understand anything they say.  All information communicated between Alice and Bob becomes completely incomprehensible to Eve.)

For E-commerce, Electronic Signature Schemes are at least as important as Public Key Encryption. Such Signature Schemes enable one to sign a message electronically.  The obvious method to sign messages electronically is to use a light-pen or mouse to sign one's name to a letter.  But this does not work! A forger can easily "cut" a signature out of one message and "paste" it into another.

Modern electronic signature schemes make signatures impossible to forge, by weaving the message and signature into one impossible-to-disentangle stream.

The workshop is organized by City University's  Department of Computer Science in cooperation with Hong Kong University's Center for Information Security & Cryptography (CISC).
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HIGHLIGHTS of the workshop include:

*MONDAY MORNING, 5 JULY,
TUTORIAL entitled "Practical Computer Security" given by BREWER, GOLDBERG and WAGNER.

*MONDAY AFTERNOON, 5 JULY,
TUTORIAL entitled "Atomicity in Electronic Commerce" given by TYGAR.

*TUESDAY MORNING, 6 JULY, PUBLIC SESSION
 

	WELCOMING REMARKS by: H K CHANG, President of City University.
	OPENING REMARKS by: K H LAU, Director of Information Technology Services, The Government of the Hong Kong SAR.
	OPENING REMARKS by: C K SIN, Legislative Councillor (Information Technology)
	PUBLIC LECTURE by SHAMIR (the S in RSA) entitled "Building Secure Systems."

Shamir's lecture is carefully crafted to be understandable to the general lay public while providing a wealth of useful information to specialized workers in the field.

*TUESDAY AFTERNOON, 6 JULY,
RIVEST (the R in RSA) will give a PUBLIC TALK entitled "Naming, Certificates, and Revocation."

*WEDNESDAY MORNING, 7 JULY,
SHAMIR will give a PLENARY TALK entitled "The Security of Block Ciphers."

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, 7 JULY,
TYGAR will give a PLENARY TALK entitled "Secure Auctions."

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WORKSHOP SIGNIFICANCE (Synopsis):

E-commerce is vital to Hong Kong.
A key requirement for E-commerce is security and privacy.
Encryption techniques, signature schemes, and associated
protocols play key roles in providing security and privacy.

The purpose of the Workshop is two-fold:
 

(i)	to report on current advances in cryptographic techniques, and
(ii)	to report on encryption and security protocols as they apply to E-commerce.

The Workshop will enable local researchers and practitioners to establish or refresh connections with world experts and foreign colleagues.

TARGET AUDIENCE: researchers and practitioners of information security and E-commerce in UNIVERSITIES and INDUSTRY.

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For further information, contact Professors

Manuel BLUM csblum@cityu.edu.hk 2788-7765
Lenore BLUM mablum@cityu.edu.hk 2784-4679
Chan LEE cschlee@cityu.edu.hk 2788-8610
Xiaotie DENG csdeng@cityu.edu.hk 2788-8632

or the Workshop Secretary
Monica LAU cryptec@cs.cityu.edu.hk 2788-9667

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