The Mathematical Mesh and the New Cryptography

Presented at The Eleventh HOPE (2016), July 24, 2016, 5 p.m. (60 minutes)

Recent events have reminded us again of the urgent need to make encryption ubiquitous on the Internet. Yet, with the exception of Transport Layer Security, encryption remains the domain of "expert" users. Hope X (2014) was held in the immediate aftermath of the publication of the Snowden papers. In the two years since, there have been many important developments in the standards world (in particular, IEEE, IETF, W3C) that are designed to defeat mass surveillance. These efforts include randomized MAC addresses for Wi-Fi, Certificate Transparency, and DNS privacy. This talk will review those efforts and provide a preview of the next generation of cryptographic applications currently being built. The PrismProof email system described at Hope X has become the core of the Mathematical Mesh, an infrastructure that solves the encryption usability problem. Once a device is connected to a user's Mesh profile, all the network application settings (including for OpenPGP, SSH, etc.) are managed automatically from an application controlled by the user. Solving the usability problem and the current move to elliptic curve based cryptography allows Internet security to move beyond the limited cryptographic primitives used in TLS, SSH, and OpenPGP. Public key encryption offers more than just encryption and signatures. Future message encryption schemes will allow end-to-end secure communication within groups of users without the sender having to create decryption material for each intended recipient.

Presenters:

  • Phillip Hallam-Baker
    Phillip Hallam-Baker has been involved in web security since 1992. He was responsible for security issues in the CERN web team and took the payments brief at the newly formed Web Consortium at MIT. After a spell working on the security of an email system deployed in the Clinton-era Executive Office of the President at the MIT AI Lab, he joined VeriSign where he spent 12 years as principal consultant. He currently divides his time between working as vice president and principal scientist at Comodo and as an expert witness in Internet-related cases. He has played a leading role in the development of many Internet standards, in particular, the WebPKI which is the certificate authority run infrastructure that provides credentials for SSL/TLS, SAML and XKMS. He is a member of the IETF Security Area Directorate and holds eight U.S. patents.

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