Dave Levin

"Securing the Internet by Proving the Impossible"

(Vortrag im Rahmen der "MPI Distinguished Lecture Series" in Kooperation mit dem Fachbereich Informatik)

The state of Internet security today is largely reactive, continually raising the defensive bar in response to increasingly sophisticated attackers. In this talk, I will present an alternate approach to building Internet systems that underlies much of my work: instead of reactively working around some attacks, what if we were to make them impossible in the first place?

I will discuss two primitives my collaborators and I have created that provide small proofs of impossibility, and I will demonstrate how they can be applied to solve large-scale problems, including censorship resistance, digital currency, and online voting. First, I will present TrInc, a small piece of trusted hardware that provides proof that an attacker could not have sent conflicting messages to others. Second, I will present Alibi Routing, a peer-to-peer system that provides proof that a user's packets could not have gone through a region of the world the user requested them to forbid. Finally, I will describe some of my ongoing and future efforts, including securing the Web's public key infrastructure.

Bio: Dave Levin is a research scientist and co-chair of the Computer Science Undergraduate Honors program at the University of Maryland. He previously worked in the Social Computing Group at Hewlett Packard Labs after getting his PhD from UMD in 2010. His work lies at the intersection of networking, security, and economics. Dave has received a best paper award at NSDI, and a best reviewer award from ACM SIGCOMM.