Research Interests
Research Inspiration
My research is about designing a security model which measures the relative strength of security in cryptographic protocols. Many existing research has focused on proving the correctness of the security protocols assuming ideal cryptography. However, many cryptographic protocols claimed to be secure turn out to be insecure.
I became interested in the comparision of the relative strength of two protocols since very little work has been done on determining the relative strength of security protocols. One possible reason is that it is difficult to quantify. I believe that in many cases it is critical to know the relative strength of the security systems regardless of their correctness.
Briefly, the following questions have inspired my research:
Given a set of assumptions, how do we measure or order the strength of security in the system?
Can we formalize this analysis of informal reasoning, and compare the relative strength of security between systems?
Research Summary
In the past, security protocol analysis has focused on formal methods and provable security, especially on the correctness of security protocols under a set of assumptions.
Relative security is interested in security systems ( e.g. security protocols) whose strength are difficult to quantify under varying sets of assumptions. We have shown how to order the relative strength of these systems in situations where the correctness approach may not help us. Therefore, the relative strength is an important area of research.
Note that our security model is neither necessary nor sufficient for correctness of the protocol.
Our model complements other works such as formal methods and provable security, but does not assume them.
What is innovative about your research?
The existing approaches used in the analysis of security protocols are as follows. The formal methods such as BAN logic, CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes), and Strand Space prove the correctness of cryptographic protocols.
The limitations of BAN logic are that the approach focuses on authentication only, and the method
claimed some protocols are correct, but found to be flawed later.
The CSP approach in which the agents are modelled as processes who can exchange messages via specific channels has a state-space explosion problem. The strand space method is successful at analyzing cryptographic protocols at the symbolic level.
Another related work is soft constraints for security analysis used to provide a qualitative or quantitative value to security properties in a protocol. The notion of security levels belongs to a finite total order, whereas we are also interested in the both partial and incomparable nature of security properties as well.
How do you see this research improving?
First of all, my research will benefit security architect and engineers who are responsible for identifying and analyzing security issues on complex security systems deployed across IT companies as well as U.S. government.
Using SoS tool, they can execute security analysis on various security systems to provide information assurance architecture.
Furthermore, it supports risk analysis, security trade-offs, and reliability for the target systems to provide security guidance and security policy support.
I envision that my current research (including my future work) delivers intellectual design and measurement capabilities, and drive secure business transformation within both Fortune 500 commercial organizations and government sectors as well.
You can e-mail me at:
hochung@usc.edu
Last update: May 15, 2007
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