SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE Faculty Candidate Nadia Heninger Microsoft Research New England RSA in the Real World I study computer security and applied cryptography using a theoretician's mathematical toolkit. Security vulnerability analysis can often be a painstaking and implementation- specific process. My approach uses cryptographic and algorithmic ideas to reason about the security of deployed systems, to question assumptions underlying the secu- rity of these systems, and to understand and model threats. In this talk, I will use RSA, the world's most widely used public key cryptosystem, as a vehicle to explore the interaction between cryptographic algorithms and real-world us- age: - Discovering widespread catastrophic failures in the random number generators in network devices by computing the greatest common divisors of millions of RSA public keys collected in the wild. - Reconstructing complete private keys using only a few bits of the private key revealed in the course of a side-channel attack. In addition to their impact on security, many of the ideas arising in the course of this work have surprising connections across computer science, leading to, for example, new algorithms for decoding families of er- ror-correcting codes, applications within theoretical cryptography, and practical privacy-enhancing tech- nologies. Nadia Heninger is a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research New England. Her research focuses on security, applied cryptography, and al- gorithms. She is best known for her work identifying widespread entropy problems in cryptographic keys on the Internet (2012 Usenix Secu- rity best paper award), and developing the "cold boot" attack against disk encryption systems (2008 Usenix Security best student paper award). In 2011-2012, she was an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow at UC San Diego. She received her Ph.D. in computer science in 2011 from Princeton and a B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science in 2004 from UC Berkeley. Monday, April 8th 10:00 a.m. GHC 6115 Host: Frank Pfenning For Appointments: Contact Diana Hyde ([email protected], x8-1156) .