CRD’s Chevassut Shares Expertise in Cryptography

Olivier Chevassut, who is the lead cryptographer for CRD, continues to build a reputation as an international expert on the theoretical and practical aspects of both cryptography and network security. In the first few months of 2006, Chevassut and several collaborators will have three conference papers and one journal article published.

As part of his work in designing and analyzing novel complex cryptographic technologies, Chevassut has served as the lead of a project entitled “Cryptographic Foundations for New Generation Distributed Systems,” also known as CryptoGrid, to complete an analysis and design of the next generation Grid security infrastructure.

Here’s a glance at his upcoming publications:

Along with co-authors Michel Abdalla, Emmanuel Bresson and David Pointcheval, Chevassut wrote “Provably Secure Password-Based Authentication in TLS.” The paper will be published in the Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on InformAtion, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS’06), to be held March 21-24 in Taipei, Taiwan. The paper, which describes how to design an efficient, provably secure password-based authenticated key exchange mechanism specifically for the TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol, is on line at <http://www.dsd.lbl.gov/Projects/ OPKeyX/Publications/ASIACCS06/ asiaccs06.html>.

A paper entitled “The Twist-Augmented Technique for Key Exchange,” which Chevassut co-authored Pierre-Alain Fouque, Pierrick Gaudry, and Pointcheval, will be published in the Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptography (PKC 2006). Chevassut will also present a second paper, along with co- authors Abdalla, Bresson and Pointcheval, on “Password-based Group Key Exchange in a Constant Number of Rounds” at the workshop. The workshop, sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research, will be held April 24-26 at Columbia University in New York. A previous version of the paper can be found at <http://eprint.iacr.org/2005/061>.

Chevassut’s third publication, co-authored with Bresson and Pointcheval, is the article “A Security Solution for IEEE 802.11’s Ad-hoc Mode: Password-Authentication and Group Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange.” The paper will be published early in 2006 in a special issue of the International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing that focuses on security of computer network and mobile systems. The article can be found at <http://dsd.lbl.gov/ Projects/SecGrpComm/Publications/IJWMC06/ ijwmc06.html>.

Chevassut obtained his doctorate in computer science (with a minor in cryptography) for his work on a reliable and secure group communication system at both the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium and Berkeley Lab.