BUSec Seminar – Bryan Ford, EPFL
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
9:45am–10:45am
Location: MCS-180 (Hariri Seminar Room), 111 Cummington Mall
Collective Authorities: Securely Decentralizing Trust at Scale
Online infrastructure depends on many security-critical authorities such as logging, time, directory, and software update services. These authorities represent high-value attack targets to hackers, criminals, and spy agencies, who can secretly compromise many hosts by stealing keys from or coercing only one such “weakest-link” authority. We propose to address these systemic weaknesses by decentralizing conventional authorities into scalable “strongest-link” authorities or cothorities.