Transparency Overlays and Applications

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• Sarah Meiklejohn (UCL)
• Thursday 17 November 2016, 11:00-12:00
• Sloman Lounge, School of Computer Science.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Andreea Radu.

In this talk, we initiate a formal study of transparency, which in recent years has become an increasingly critical requirement for the systems in which people place trust. We present the abstract concept of a transparency overlay, which can be used in conjunction with any system to give it provable transparency guarantees, and then apply the overlay to two settings: Certificate Transparency and Bitcoin. In the latter setting, we show that the usage of our transparency overlay eliminates the need to engage in mining and allows users to store a single small value rather than the entire blockchain. Our transparency overlay is generically constructed from a signature scheme and a new primitive we call a dynamic list commitment, which in practice can be instantiated using a collision-resistant hash function. This is joint work with Melissa Chase that appeared at CCS 2016 .

This talk is part of the Computer Security Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Computer Science Departmental Series
• Computer Science Distinguished Seminars
• Computer Security Seminars
• Sloman Lounge, School of Computer Science
• computer sience

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