Hyper-Encryption and Provably Everlasting Secrecy

Modern encryption methods are based for their security on unproven assumptions such as the computational intractability of factorization of large integers. This has prompted research into alternatives such as quantum cryptography. We consider an encryption method employing an intensive public stream of random bits. The Sender and Receiver use a shared private key to extract from the stream one-time pads used to encrypt messages. We have shown, together with Y. Aumann and Y.Z. Ding, that this leads to provably unbreakable encryption and to everlasting secrecy. More recently we created the Virtual Satellite model, now being implemented at Harvard, which again provides provably unbreakable encryption. The talk will be self contained.

Short Biography:

Michael Rabin is T.J. Watson Sr. Professor of CS at Harvard University.

Rabin got his Ph.D. from Princeton University, where he had his first academic appointment. He was Albert Einstein Professor of Mathematics at the Hebrew University, serving as its Academic Head from 1972 to 1975. At various times he held visiting Professorships at Yale, UC Berkeley, MIT, University of Paris, The Courant Institute of Mathematics, Caltech, ETH Zurich, and Columbia University, he was the Henry Saville Fellow at Merton College, Oxford.

His contributions were recognized by awards including the ACM Turing Award, The IEEE Charles Babbage Award, The Harvey Prize for Science and Technology, and the Israel Prize in Computer Science, as well as by election to academies including the US National Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Sciences and the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He holds five honorary degrees.

Rabin's research interests include complexity of computations, efficient algorithms, randomized algorithms, DNA to DNA Computing, Parallel and Distributed computation and computer security. Over the past three years he has created, with Y. Aumann and Y.Z. Ding, Hyper-Encryption, the first ever encryption scheme provably providing everlasting secrecy against a computationally unbounded adversary, now being implemented at Harvard.

Homepage: http://www.deas.harvard.edu/faculty/profile/Michael_Rabin