Wed. April 16, 2008: Apu Kapadia on Accountable Anonymity
The Center for Research on Computation and Society continues its
weekly lunch seminar:
CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar
Date: Wednesday, 16 April 2008
Time: 12:00pm-1:30 pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119
Topic: Accountable Anonymity
Speaker: Apu Kapadia (PhD UIUC 2005)
IMPORTANT NOTE: If anyone would like to meet with Apu outside
of the talk on 4/16, please contact Evie (etaylor@seas.harvard.edu)
and we will set up a meeting.
ABSTRACT:
Anonymizing networks such as Tor allow users to access Internet
services privately using a series of routers to hide the client’s IP
address from the server. Tor’s success, however, has been limited by
users employing this anonymity for abusive purposes, such as defacing
Wikipedia. Website administrators rely on IP-address blocking for
disabling access to misbehaving users, but this method is not
practical if the abuser routes through Tor. As a result,
administrators block all Tor exit nodes, denying anonymous access to
honest and dishonest users alike. A few bad apples spoil the fun for
everybody.
To address this problem, we present a low-overhead credential system
called Nymble to provide “anonymous blacklisting.” With Nymble, (1)
honest users remain anonymous; (2) a server can complain and blacklist
an anonymous user to recognize future connections from that user; and
(3) users are aware of their blacklist status and can thus choose to
remain anonymous by not accessing the service. As a result of these
properties, our system is agnostic to servers’ varying definitions of
misbehavior—servers can blacklist any user, for whatever reason, and
users need not worry about a reduction in privacy from such
blacklisting.
BIOGRAPHY:
Apu Kapadia received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in October 2005. For his
dissertation research on trustworthy communication, Apu received a
four-year High-Performance Computer Science Fellowship from the
Department of Energy. Following his doctorate, Apu joined Dartmouth
College as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Institute for
Security Technology Studies (ISTS). He is interested in topics related
to systems security and privacy. He is particularly interested in
accountable anonymity, privacy-enhancing technologies such as
anonymizing networks, usable models and policy languages for privacy,
and applied cryptography.
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~akapadia/