We're delighted to report that Prof. Anna Lysyanskaya has been awarded one of NSF's prestigious CAREER grants. These grants are designed, NSF says, to "recognize and support the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century". CAREER awardees are "selected on the basis of creative career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization" and "build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education." Congratulations, Anna!
Anna summarizes her proposed work thus: "A typical computer user performs a multitude of electronic transactions each day: reading e-mail, managing bank accounts, making on-line purchases, to name a few. Each of them must be secure: they should be carried out by authorized users only, and the information entered must be authentic. On the other hand, each transaction should be private: personal information or account balances should not become available without a user's explicit consent. Since data aggregation is simple to do, it is highly desirable to limit the information transmitted in each transaction to a bare minimum without compromising its authenticity.
"Cryptographic schemes that make this possible are the intended direct outcome of this research. This project investigates the security requirements of the basic protocols that a system for secure and private electronic transactions would comprise and develops efficient and provably secure digital signature schemes and other primitives that lend themselves to the design of such protocols."
