Applied Cryptography
Cryptography research at SPAR is concerned with the design and implementation
of cryptographic protocols and primitives. Our work focuses on
efficiency and provable security, and includes digital signatures, hash
functions, searchable encryption, identity-based encryption and elliptic
curve cryptography.
Biometrics
Biometrics research at SPAR is primarily concerned with improving
classic authentication techniques by exploiting dynamic biometric
features such as keystroke dynamics, voice or handwriting.
Additionally, although biometric systems have recently received a great
deal of interest, we believe that current practices for measuring the
security of such systems are inadequate. Thus, we seek to improve the
security of biometric systems by developing more rigorous models for
their evaluation.
Distributed Telescopes
We are investigating the use of multiple co-ordinated network telescopes
to detect the spread of active Internet worms. While individual
telescopes have already been used for forensic analysis of Internet
Worms such as Code Red and Slammer affecting million of computers
worldwide, we believe that multiple small telescopes that are
geographically distributed can have higher detection capability compared
to a single large telescope and at the same time be easier to deploy.
Electronic Voting
Research in electronic voting at SPAR is conducted under the auspices of
ACCURATE. ACCURATE
is a multi-institution voting research center funded by the National
Science Foundation (NSF) under their CyberTrust program. The goals of
the center are to research ways in which technology can be used to
improve voting systems and the voting process; to develop the science
that will help inform the election community and the public about the
tradeoffs among various voting technologies and procedures; to serve as
a resource to the elections community, politicians, vendors and the
public about issues related to public policy, technology, and law with
respect to voting; and to publish and disseminate our research so that
future systems can benefit from the center's work.
Network Simulation
Simnet is a discrete-event
network simulator, designed specifically for analyzing network-security
protocols. The simulator was created for JHU's
Network
Security course so its design and implementation is focused on
simplicity of abstraction and extensibility. Moreover, its modular
architecture allows operators to dynamically customize running
simulations. Simnet is not only scalable and efficient, but provides a
viable platform for prototyping and analyzing non-trivial security
protocols.
Secure DNS
The
SK-DNSSEC project is
about securing the Domain Name System. In order to have a secure DNS,
two security requirements have to be met at a minimum: data origin
authentication and data integrity. Currently, most of the security
community's efforts to secure DNS have focused on a set of extensions to
DNS, which are mainly based on public-key cryptography (PK-DNSSEC).
Unlike the PK-DNSSEC proposal, SK-DNSSEC is an extension that makes use
almost exclusively of symmetric-key cryptography.