Projects
Below, I provide information on a few research projects on which I have worked in the past.Secure PIN Entry
We devised and analyzed the security and usability of a
PIN entry method that is resilient
against shoulder surfing. The method is based on cognitive trapdoor
games. Enhancements provide resilience against camera recording.
[more]
Usable and Secure E-Mail
Towards increasing the benefits versus overhead ratio of secure e-mail,
we present and justify an approach that considers security and usability
tradeoffs from the outset. Following
Saltzer's and Schroeder's
recommendations, our approach is designed to be as simple and small
as possible, have fail-safe defaults, and be easy to understand and
use.
[more]
Listen & Whisper
BGP, the current inter-domain routing protocol, assumes that the routing
information propagated by authenticated routers is correct. This
assumption renders the current infrastructure vulnerable to both
accidental misconfigurations and deliberate attacks. We
present two routing security
mechanisms, which do not require a public key infrastructure nor
prior key exchange.
[more]
CODEC and Java Security
Programmers are the users of software libraries, and libraries should
be developed with usability in mind. CODEC is a Java library for the
encoding and decoding of a variety of cryptographic syntax standards,
and has been designed with usability, safety and efficiency in mind. It
integrates with the JCA/JCE framework and provides unique features to
access cryptographic functionality in a fashion that is truely
independent of cryptographic service providers. CODEC is used in
commercial PKI products and research projects.
[more]
Mobile Agents & Security
The idea of mobile software agents has inspired many
researchers ever since the term was coined, probably by Jim White of General
Magic around 1994, although the principal idea is much older. Shoch and Hupp
at Xerox PARC published their idea of the
Worm programs
already in 1982, and they were in turn inspired by John Brunner's 1975
science fiction novel "The Shockwave Rider". Besides
experimentation with the technology, the security of mobile agents is one of
the most fascinating research aspects of that technology.
The SeMoA project, running since 1997, is
about both.
[more]
Content-Based Video Retrieval
Digital video is the next big media. However, indexing and searching on
digital video is a hard problem. In order to explore the potential of
content based video retrieval I developed a system that supports drag
& drop queries for digital video. The system uses propositional
networks as its underlying knowledge representation,
and flooding of activation as its query mechanism.
[more]