Position-based Cryptography

We consider what constitutes identities in cryptography. Typical examples include your name and your social-security number, or your fingerprint/iris-scan, or your address, or your (non-revoked) public-key coming from some trusted public-key infrastructure. In many situations, however, where you are defines your identity. For example, we know the role of a bank-teller behind a bullet-proof bank window not because she shows us her credentials but by merely knowing her location. In this paper, we initiate the study of cryptographic protocols where the identity (or other credentials and inputs) of a party are derived from its geographic location.

We explore the possibility of “Position Based Cryptography” and construct secure protocols for two fundamental tasks: secure positioning and position based key exchange.

Based on joint work with Vipul Goyal, Ryan Moriarty, Rafail Ostrovsky.

Speaker Details

Nishanth Chandran is a doctorate student at UCLA working with Prof. Rafail Ostrovsky and Prof. Amit Sahai. His research interests are cryptography, security and theory in general. He has published several papers in leading conferences such as FOCS, CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT and so on. Nishanth was awarded the Graduate Student Fellowship as well as the Dissertation Year Fellowship from the Graduate Division at UCLA. He obtained a Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from Anna University, India in 2005 and a Masters in Computer Science from UCLA in 2007.

Date:
Speakers:
Nishanth Chandran
Affiliation:
UCLA