ICICS Best Paper Awards

12-15-2006

 

Purdue researchers were honored with two awards given at the Eighth International Conference on Information and Communications Security (ICICS '06). Prof. Ninghui Li and Dr. Jiangtao Li won the best paper award. Danfeng Yao's (CERIAS, Brown University) collaborative work with Prof. Keith Frikken (Miami University), Prof. Mike Atallah (Purdue University) and Prof. Roberto Tamassia (Brown University) won the best student paper award.

Prof. Ninghui Li and Dr. Jiangtao Li won their award for their paper, "A Construction for General and Efficient Oblivious Commitment Based Envelope Protocols." The paper presents a cryptographic protocol that enables efficient oblivious attribute-based access control. The protocol, called an oblivious commitment-based envelope (or OCBE) protocol, is executed between a resource owner and a requester. The OCBE protocol ensures that the requester gets access to a requested resource if and only if the access control policy set by the resource owner is satisfied by the requester's attributes, which are documented by digitally signed certificates. Furthermore, the resource owner learns nothing about the requester's attributes, not even whether they satisfy the policy or not. This apparently paradoxical property is achieved by having the resource owner send the resource in an encrypted form so that the requester can decrypt if and only if his or her certified attributes satisfy the resource owner's policy, and the resource owner does not learn whether the requester is able to decrypt or not. In this way, the protocol ensures that the resource owner's access control policy is enforced while protecting the requester's privacy.

Prof. Li is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. He joined Purdue University in August 2003. Dr. Jiangtao Li graduated from Purdue University with a Ph.D. in Computer Science in May 2006. His PhD. advisors were Prof. Mike Atallah and Prof. Ninghui Li. He is currently a security architect at Intel.

Purdue researchers were also involved in the winning submission for best student paper. Those involved include Danfeng Yao, Prof. Keith Frikken, and Prof. Mike Atallah. The paper was entitled "Point-based Trust Define How Much Privacy is Worth." Prof. Atallah is a Professor of Computer Science. He joined Purdue in 1982. Danfeng Yao worked with Prof. Atallah as a visiting researcher from Brown University. Keith Frikken also worked on this paper while he was at Purdue.

The 2006 ICICS conference was held in Raleigh, North Carolina December 4-7. Awards were presented to only two of the 119 submissions. Visit the ICICS '06 website for more details on the event.