cryptec

Ronald L RIVEST
Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
MIT
545 Technology Square, Room 324
Cambridge MA 02139
USA
Email : rivest@mit.edu

Video

Session Chair

Abstract

Biography

Lecture Note

Naming, Certificates, and Revocation

Session Chair : Manuel Blum, UC Berkeley, USA

Abstract

The effective coordination of globally distributed computer systems requires the consistent use of global name spaces; the meaning of a name in Hong Kong should be the same as its meaning in Boston.The vast scale of the Internet, together with the concern for security, makes the management of global name spaces a real challenge. Who should be allowed to assign a meaning to a name? How should these definitions be communicated securely to others? How can such a definition be changed?

We discuss several approaches to these problems, focussing on the use of digital certificates as a secure binding mechanism. The use of interlinked local name spaces, first pioneered by Lampson and Rivest in the design of the SDSI system, will be highlighted as an approach that circumvents some of the problems intrinsic to a more typical hierarchical naming scheme, and which allows a richer set of names, including threshold names. Finally, the problems associated with changing definitions will be met with a radical proposal---the elimination of certificate revocation schemes altogether.

Biography

Professor Ronald L. Rivest is the Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is an Associate Director of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, and a leader of that lab's research group on Cryptography and Information Security. His research interests have included algorithms, machine learning, VLSI design, and cryptography. He is a founder of RSA Data Security, a leading manufacturer of cryptographic software, now a subsidiary of Security Dynamics. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a director of the International Financial Cryptography Association, and one of the editors-in-chief of Springer-Verlag's Cryptography and Information Security series.