Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: RUI: Applied Cryptographic Protocols with Provably-Secure Foundations

Cryptographic protocols have become an essential facilitator for the Internet and its many applications, supporting the needs of modern society. It is hard to imagine the Internet without the extensive use of applied cryptographic protocols, e.g., protocols used to secure web and email. Such protocols use and depend on the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which is also key to the security of other open systems such as mobile networks, Internet of Things, and blockchains.

PKI provides a critical security infrastructure to achieve confidentiality, authentication, integrity and non-repudiation. However, there have been many attacks exploiting vulnerabilities of the PKI itself; PKI, in contrast to other well-known cryptographic protocols, has no security proofs or even precise definitions of security goals. As a result, systems utilizing PKI may be vulnerable.

The proposed research will define security goals for PKI schemes, present PKI schemes which provably meet these goals, and present practical and efficient implementations of PKI schemes. This research will also develop the necessary theoretical tools to define security goals of cryptographic protocols and to analyze their security. The outcomes of this research will have broad benefits.

Developers will benefit from the availability of open-source, provably secure PKI systems, enabling security for real-world applications. End-users will benefit from improved security guarantees and privacy. Given the global role of the Internet, society at large will benefit from a strengthened, advanced security infrastructure and PKI ecosystem and from educational efforts which will raise awareness of the importance of these topics.

Furthermore, this research will support the development of a diverse cohort of graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Connecticut and Trinity College through increased research opportunities, education, and mentoring and outreach efforts.

Research efforts of this project, the results of which will significantly impact the theoretical and practical aspects of developing and deploying cryptographic protocols, are organized in three main areas: 1) Advancement of PKI theory: to define a comprehensive set of formal PKI requirements, and to design and analyze schemes to produce provably secure PKI schemes; 2) Development of PKI systems with improved security guarantees: to design, develop, and standardize provably secure PKI designs that are practical and appropriate for real-world applications; 3) Development of a framework and tools to facilitate provable security for applied cryptographic protocols under realistic models: to build a comprehensive framework that supports composability and formal verification tools for rigorous specification and analysis.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.