Securing the Foundations of Security

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Cryptographic tools have become an integral part of computer and communication security. While the use of these tools is often necessary for achieving security goals, it is also the case that schemes and protocols built upon secure cryptographic primitives may themselves fail to be secure. Recent well-publicized attacks, such as Logjam and POODLE, demonstrate that security depends on a complex interaction between mathematical security guarantees for cryptographic primitives, protocol and system design, implementation, and configuration. While there is no single magic bullet which will provide security assurance in complex information and communication systems which use cryptography, it is important to develop techniques and tools which make the interaction between the various aspects of security systems described above more transparent. My research focuses on the relationship between the first two of these aspects, with the goal of developing cryptographic and formal tools which will make it easier to verify that schemes and protocols designed using secure cryptographic primitives achieve their security goals. I will do this by applying techniques from provable security, logic, probability, computational information theory, decision theory, and optimization.