Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

Advances in communication technologies and cyber-physical systems change the way people communicate. For example, Internet brings together people who do not know each other before hand to engage in discussion of a certain topic. People can make seamless payment using stored-value smartcard or auto-toll devices. One indispensable feature in these systems is privacy. However, perfect privacy may be abused, e.g., vandalism in discussion forum, money laundering, etc.

Anonymous credential offers a cryptographic authentication mechanism that aims to provide accountability and privacy at the same time. They are useful in applications which just require a proof of certain attributes such as membership, instead of positive identification of the user. Normally, the users remain anonymous, yet they are still accountable for their actions after authentication, by the means of anonymity revocation.

This talk will focus on our ongoing research work in balancing between privacy and accountability. In particular, we will discuss improvement on Microsoft's U-Prove, and anonymous credential with reputation and revocation.

 

Sherman S.M. Chow joined the Department of Information Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as an assistant professor in November 2012. He was a research fellow at Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo, a position he commenced after receiving his Ph.D. degree from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. He interned at NTT Research and Development (Tokyo), Microsoft Research (Redmond) and Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory. His research interests are applied cryptography, privacy and distributed systems security in general. He serves on the program committees of several conferences on these topics including ASIACRYPT 12-14, ACNS 12-13, ASIACCS 13-14, ESORICS 13-14, IEEE-CNS 13, and Financial Crypt. 13. He also serves on the editorial boards of Intl. J. Information Security and J. of Information Security and Applications. He will be co-chairing ProvSec 14 and ISC 14. He has received the Early Career Award 13/14 by the Hong Kong Research Grant Council.