Enabling Effective Trust Judgments
Sean Smith
Department of Computer Science/Dartmouth PKI Lab
Dartmouth College
Abstract:
A key part of making our society's
information infrastructure work is enabling the parties involved---human
users as well as programs---to make effective trust judgments about each
other. Should A trust B for action X? If it's all
just wires and bits, how can A know? This problem is made even
messier by the emerging multiplicity of users, roles, machines,
administrative domains, application contexts, and opinions about what
constitutes valid grounds for trust.
Over the past several years, my students and I have been exploring the
technological issues underlying effective trust judgments. This talk
surveys some of this research.
- Why should we trust what's happening at a remote server? I'll
discuss our work in secure coprocessing, attestation, and integrating
TCPA/TCG support into Linux, as well as in applications enabled by
these platforms.
- Do clients provide the right information and signals to enable
effective judgment? I'll discuss our work in trusted path defensess
against spoofing server-side SSL, as well some attacks on digital
signatures and client-side SSL.
- How do we transmit the information necessary for effective trust
judgment in complex scenarios? I'll discuss our work in improving
efficiency for S-BGP routing in the Internet, and in using
X-509/SPKI-SDSI hybrids for delegating guest access in wireless
networks.
Dr. Smith's Acrobat slides
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