Talks

These are some talks I've given. Listed in reverse chronological order. I have not made any attempt to separate "real" talks from reading group talks and the like. I'm usually still interested in chatting about these topics, so feel free to drop me an e-mail.

• Talk at UC Berkeley on "Security Beyond Two Dimensions".
• Talk at Microsoft Research about RFID privacy & security. Includes a passing reference to Law & Order : Special Victims Unit.
• Presentation of our paper at ICISC 2005. Extends the work-in-progress talk from Usenix Security.
• Presentation of our work on electronic passports at SecureComm 2005.
• Talk to accompany paper presentation at Selected Areas in Cryptography 2005 on RFID Pseudonyms.
• Work-in-progress talk at Usenix Security 2005 on transforming away control-flow side channels.
• Panel discussion at Berkeley Library RFID Community Forum.
• "Library RFID Privacy and Security (An Overview)" Presentation for a panel on RFID given at the 2005 American Library Association conference in Chicago. The sheer scale of ALA is amazing: there were over 20,000 people at the conference total, although maybe only 50 or 60 showed up for our panel. Updates the LACASIS presentation but does not entirely supersede.
• "Electronic Passports and RFID Pseudonyms." First presented at the CENTS Retreat in January 2005, then again (with some updates) at EPFL and IBM Zurich in June 2005. Starts off discussing the U.S. deployment of electronic passports, then reports on scalable, delegatable RFID pseudonym protocols. The talk ties together the two pieces of work, but it turns out there are a number of practical issues that make RFID pseudonyms of the type we discuss not such a great idea for passports. For one thing, readers in Europe tend to be offline.
• "An Analysis of Empirical PMF Based Tests for Detection of LSB Embedding." Paper presentation at Information Hiding Workshop 2005.
• "Privacy and Security in Library RFID: Issues, Practices, and Architectures." Presentation of our library RFID paper at ACM CCS 2004.
• "Provably Secure Steganography -or- The TGIF Talk The Department of Defense Doesn't Want You To See," for Theory Graduate Informal Forum. I discussed the provably secure steganography of von Ahn, Hopper, and Langford, and the recent lower bound by Dedic, Itkis, Reyzin, and Russell. The lower bound is interesting from a foundational point of view because it needs the techniques for "truthful" implementation of random objects developed by Goldwasser, Goldreich, and Nussboim.
• Library RFID Security and Privacy - short overview slides to accompany panel discussion at LACASIS Workshop on Library Privacy.
• ``Wireless LAN Security: What Every Technical Professional Should Know," for ISA Automation West conference. Fascinating opportunity to meet people engaged in the management of critical infrastructure. The paper itself was written for Legra Systems,Inc., a wireless LAN startup. They in turn submitted it to ISA, and so I ended up in Long Beach. Strange how small a world it is sometimes.
• ``Poisson Approximation, Balls-and-Bins Models, and Differential Equations," for Berkeley Theory Graduate Informal Forum. Who would have thought that sensor networks, balls-and-bins, and "Grover's Theorem" about differential equations would all end up in the same talk?
• "On the (In)security of the Fiat-Shamir Paradigm," by Goldwasser and Tauman Kalai. Also for complexity theory reading group.
• "Beyond The Black-Box Simulation Barrier." I presented the paper by Boaz Barak at complexity theory reading group. My presentation had errors, but it made me read the paper.
• "Zero-Knowledge Watermarking and Proofs of Ownership." Presented a paper by Adelsbach and Sadeghi for our information hiding reading group. Note that Information Hiding Workshop 2004 has a paper discussing attacks on this approach.
• "Spectral Graph Theory and Spectral Partitioning." Abstract. I gave this talk because Luca covered a construction of Guruswami and Indyk in class that used spectral partitioning. I didn't have any idea what spectral partitioning was. Originally was going to cover that construction, but I had to scale down to something manageable. Ended up going over their proof of a theorem due to Mihail. Moral of the talk: eigenvalues are cool, and Spielman-Teng's work is hard. See also Jon Kelner's best student paper in STOC 2004.
• "Hard-Core Bits, the Goldreich-Levin Theorem, and Local List Decoding." Abstract.
  This talk was an excuse to bring my favorite brand of apple cider to TGIF. Also, I wanted to show people that cryptography can make fundamental contributions to theory. I hate it when people say "if the result were any good, they would have submitted it to STOC."
• "Identity-Based Chameleon Hash Functions." Covered a paper by Atienese and de Medeiros for Security Reading Group. I could have prepared this one better, but it led to some interesting speculations.
• Rijndael lecture for CS220r: Cryptography at Harvard. The professor went out of town, so I ended up giving a lecture on Rijndael. Went pretty well.
• "User Interfaces for Code Audit Tools," at MIT Applied Security Reading Group. They need improvement. If you have ideas on this, I'd like to hear from you.
• "Homomorphic Signature Schemes," at NYU cryptography seminar. Thanks to Yevgeniy Dodis for hosting me. Also presented at RSA 2002 Conference, Cryptographer's Track.
• Panelist at INET2002 on "Peer-to-Peer."
• Guest lecture on SSL for Markus Jakobsson's summer school class at NYU.
• "Resource Allocation in Higher Ed Peer-to-Peer," at Internet2 Workshop on Peer-to-Peer and Higher Education. Thanks to the good people at O'Reilly.
• "The SETI@Home Problem," MIT Applied Security Reading Group. I wrote an article based on this talk. Recently I found that it was translated into Russian. I'm amused by the need to carefully define ``right thing."
• "The Uses of Signature Schemes," expository talk for Harvard CS Table. I like signature schemes.