"Trinity Professor Receives NSF Grant to Study and Improve Cybersecurity"

A Trinity College professor and her research collaborators, including Trinity students, will work to make Internet communications more secure with an $850,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. Ewa Syta, Associate Professor of Computer Science, will collaborate with Amir Herzberg, Comcast Endowed Professor for Security Innovation at the University of Connecticut, on the NSF-funded project "Applied Cryptographic Protocols with Provably-Secure Foundation." The study focuses on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which Syta describes as something that everyone uses to encrypt messages for confidentiality. It is a hidden component of the Internet infrastructure, but it is completely broken, according to her. With over 100 different certificate authorities issuing public key certificates, which are used to authenticate the source of a message, and no standard definition of security for PKI, Syta believes there is plenty of room for bad actors to exploit. In the past, hackers have stolen certificate authorities' master keys and issued phony certificates to major websites. According to Syta, some certificate authorities improperly delegated their certificate-issuing authority, while others purposefully issued rogue certificates. Such flaws enable attackers to issue fake certificates, launch phishing attacks, and conduct website spoofing attacks, potentially leading to identity theft, surveillance, compromise of personal and confidential information, and other serious security breaches. The project's goal is to lay a provably secure foundation for applied cryptographic protocols, especially PKI, and to improve the security of the Internet and the systems with which users interact. The research will benefit both developers and users by providing access to provably secure systems. A strengthened security infrastructure, together with educational reports to raise awareness of the importance of cybersecurity and new ways to encourage students to learn about cryptography and cybersecurity, will benefit everyone. This article continues to discuss the NSF-funded "Applied Cryptographic Protocols with Provably-Secure Foundation" project.

Trinity College reports "Trinity Professor Receives NSF Grant to Study and Improve Cybersecurity"