Category: Cryptography

Teaching cybersecurity to criminologists

I recently had the pleasure of teaching my first module at UCL, an introduction to cybersecurity for students in the SECReT doctoral training centre.

The module had been taught before, but always from a fairly computer-science-heavy perspective. Given that the students had largely no background in computer science, and that my joint appointment in the Department of Security and Crime Science has given me at least some small insight into what aspects of cybersecurity criminologists might find interesting, I chose to design the lecture material largely from scratch. I tried to balance the technical components of cybersecurity that I felt everyone needed to know (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, included a fair amount of cryptography) with high-level design principles and the overarching question of how we define security. Although I say I designed the curriculum from scratch, I of course ended up borrowing heavily from others, most notably from the lecture and exam material of my former supervisor’s undergraduate cybersecurity module (thanks, Stefan!) and from George’s lecture material for Introduction to Computer Security. If anyone’s curious, the lecture material is available on my website.

As I said, the students in the Crime Science department (and in particular the ones taking this module) had little to no background in computer science.  Instead, they had a diverse set of academic backgrounds: psychology, political science, forensics, etc. One of the students’ proposed dissertation titles was “Using gold nanoparticles on metal oxide semiconducting gas sensors to increase sensitivity when detecting illicit materials, such as explosives,” so it’s an understatement to say that we were approaching cybersecurity from different directions!

With that in mind, one of the first things I did in my first lecture was to take a poll on who was familiar with certain concepts (e.g., SSH, malware, the structure of the Internet), and what people were interested in learning about (e.g., digital forensics, cryptanalysis, anonymity). I don’t know what I was expecting, but the responses really blew me away! The students overwhelmingly wanted to hear about how to secure themselves on the Internet, both in terms of personal security habits (e.g., using browser extensions) and in terms of understanding what and how things might go wrong. Almost the whole class specifically requested Tor, and a few had even used it before.

This theme of being (pleasantly!) surprised continued throughout the term.  When I taught certificates, the students asked not for more details on how they work, but if there was a body responsible for governing certificate authorities and if it was possible to sue them if they misbehave. When I taught authentication, we played a Scattergories-style game to weigh the pros and cons of various authentication mechanisms, and they came up with answers like “a con of backup security questions is that they reveal cultural trends that may then be used to reveal age, ethnicity, gender, etc.”

There’s still a month and a half left until the students take the exam, so it’s too soon to say how effective it was at teaching them cybersecurity, but for me the experience was a clear success and one that I look forward to repeating and refining in the future.

One-out-of-Many Proofs: Or How to Leak a Secret and Spend a Coin

I’m going to EUROCRYPT 2015 to present a new zero-knowledge proof that I’ve developed together with Markulf Kohlweiss from Microsoft Research. Zero-knowledge proofs enable you to demonstrate that a particular statement is true without revealing anything else than the fact it is true. In our case the statements are one-out-of-many statements, intuitively that out of a number of items one of them has a special property, and we greatly reduce the size of the proofs compared to previous works in the area. Two applications where one-out-of-many proofs come in handy are ring signatures and Zerocoin.

Ring signatures can be used to sign a message anonymously as a member of a group of people, i.e., all a ring signature says is that somebody from the group signed the message but not who it was. Consider for instance a whistleblower who wants to leak her company is dumping dangerous chemicals in the ocean, yet wants to remain anonymous due to the risk of being fired. By using a ring signature she can demonstrate that she works for the company, which makes the claim more convincing, without revealing which employee she is. Our one-out-of-many proofs can be used to construct very efficient ring signatures by giving a one-out-of-many proof that the signer holds a secret key corresponding to a public key for one of the people in the ring.

Zerocoin is a new virtual currency proposal where coins gain value once they’ve been accepted on a public bulletin board. Each coin contains a commitment to a secret random serial number that only the owner knows. To anonymously spend a coin the owner publishes the serial number and gives a one-out-of-many proof that the serial number corresponds to one of the public coins. The serial number prevents double spending of a coin; nobody will accept a transaction with a previously used serial number. The zero-knowledge property of the one-out-of-many proof provides anonymity; it is not disclosed which coin the serial number corresponds to. Zerocoin has been suggested as a privacy enhancing add-on to Bitcoin.

The full research paper is available on the Cryptology ePrint Archive.