NYC LOCAL: Wednesday 9 January 2008 NYCBUG: Angelos Keromytis on SSARES, secure email on remote untrusted server

[secretary]

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 Date: Sun, 06 Jan 2008 21:41:11 -0500
 To: "Announcements only list for NYCBUG (announcements are not cross-posted to 
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 From: NYC*BUG Announcements <announce@lists.nycbug.org>
 Subject: [announce] NYC*BUG: Wednesday January 9th
 Reply-To: announce@lists.nycbug.org

 Angelos Keromytis on SSARES

 Suspenders Restaurant, 6:30pm

 http://www.suspendersbar.com/location.php

 Please note that we our January meeting will be held January 9th instead 
 of on January 2nd

 SSARES: Secure Searchable Automated Remote Email Storage - A usable, 
 secure email system on a remote untrusted server

 The increasing centralization of networked services places user
 data at considerable risk. For example, many users store email on
 remote servers rather than on their local disk. Doing so allows
 users to gain the benefit of regular backups and remote
 access, but it also places a great deal of unwarranted trust in
 the server. Since most email is stored in plaintext, a compromise
 of the server implies the loss of confidentiality and
 integrity of the email stored therein. Although users could
 employ an end-to-end encryption scheme (e.g., PGP), such measures
 are not widely adopted, require action on the sender side, only
 provide partial protection (the email headers remain in the
 clear), and prevent the users from performing some common
 operations, such as server-side search.

 To address this problem, we present Secure Searchable Automated
 Remote Email Storage (SSARES), a novel system that offers a
 practical approach to both securing remotely stored email and
 allowing privacy-preserving search of that email collection. Our
 solution encrypts email (the headers, body, and attachments) as
 it arrives on the server using public-key encryption. SSARES uses
 a combination of Identity Based Encryption and Bloom Filters to
 create a searchable index. This index reveals little information
 about search keywords and queries, even against adversaries that
 compromise the server. SSARES remains largely transparent to both
 the sender and recipient. However, the system also incurs
 significant costs, primarily in terms of expanded storage
 requirements. We view our work as a starting point toward
 creating privacy-friendly hosted services.

 Angelos Keromytis is an Associate Professor with the Department
 of Computer Science at Columbia University, and director of the
 Network Security Laboratory. He received his B.Sc. in Computer
 Science from the University of Crete, Greece, and his M.Sc. and
 Ph.D. from the Computer and Information Science (CIS) Department,
 University of Pennsylvania. He is the author and co-author of
 more than 100 papers on refereed conferences and journals, and
 has served on over 40 conference program committees. He is an
 associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Information and
 Systems Security (TISSEC). He recently co-authored a book on
 using graphics cards for security, and is a co-founder of
 StackSafe Inc. His current research interests revolve around
 systems and network security, and cryptography.

 The paper on this topic is at 
 http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~angelos/Papers/2007/SSARES_ACSAC.pdf

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Distributed poC TINC:

Jay Sulzberger <secretary@lxny.org>
Corresponding Secretary LXNY
LXNY is New York's Free Computing Organization.
http://www.lxny.org