If you are in the Urbana, Illinois area this seems interesting: http://webtools.uiuc.edu/calendar/Calendar?ACTION=VIEW_EVENT&calId=442&skinId=39&DATE=9/7/2007&eventId=70427 or http://tinyurl.com/yo8va4
Speaker: Dr. João Barros, University of Porto, Portugal Date: Sep 20, 21, 24, 25th, 2007 Time: 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm Location: 301 Coordinated Science Laboratory Sponsor: Information Trust Institute University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Event type: Seminar ABSTRACT: A typical graduate course in cryptography and security always starts by discussing Shannon's notion of perfect secrecy (widely accepted as the strictest notion of security) and by emphasizing its conceptual beauty. Right after that, it questions the practicality of information-theoretic security. Such an introduction, which is indeed pervasive, provides the perfect motivation for state-of-the-art upper-layer encryption algorithms that are insensitive to the physical characteristics of the communications channel and rely on mathematical operations assumed to be hard to compute, such as prime factorization and the discrete logarithm function. In this short intensive course, we shall do exactly the opposite. First, we shall present in detail the necessary tools and background for basic concepts of information-theoretic security, highlighting the differences between information-theoretic security and classical cryptography. Next we discuss the major achievements of information-theoretic security, and then demonstrate its potential to strengthen significantly the security of digital communications, well beyond what can be achieved by cryptographic means alone. The basic idea behind the resulting physical-layer security protocols is to exploit the randomness of the communication channels to guarantee that the sent messages cannot be decoded by a third party maliciously eavesdropping. Security is ensured not relatively to a hard mathematical problem but by the physical uncertainty inherent to the noisy channel: the crux of Shannon's information theory. The course shall consist of four separate lectures that are complementary yet can be followed independently of each other. Details on the four lectures available @ http://webtools.uiuc.edu/calendar/Calendar?ACTION=VIEW_EVENT&calId=442&skinId=39&DATE=9/7/2007&eventId=70429 _______________________________________________ FDE mailing list [email protected] http://www.xml-dev.com/mailman/listinfo/fde
