Delegation and Revocation for Internet Security

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This research program focuses on designing and developing systems and protocols to enable secure delegation of services and trust to third parties. For example, when a website relies on third party services, the user (and their browser) need to be confident that this third party is securely delegated to act on behalf of that website, and to only perform the actions it is delegated to do. Additionally, if such delegation expires, or if the website wishes to discontinue such delegation, the browser needs to be aware of this to detect and prevent suspicious activities. Secure delegation and revocation is becoming increasingly important for Internet services and operations. Many academic proposals face deployability challenges in practice due to the lack of secure delegation standards. For example, a geolocation service provider can protect users from man-in-the-middle attacks by providing users with an assurance of the geographic location where the physical server they are contacting resides. Users can then have the option to terminate a connection, or refrain from proceeding with a transaction, if they do not trust the location of that server. Another example is when an authentication server (e.g., the user's email provider) relies on users' geographic locations (given their consent) to protect their accounts from impersonation by attackers. Because robust Internet geolocation techniques often require a verification infrastructure, it does not make financial sense to many websites to deploy and maintain such an infrastructure on their own. It will thus be of high value to securely delegate third parties for reliable geolocation. Other benefits of secure delegation and revocation also exist for other applications, such as securing DNS delegation (e.g., to address DNS-based Internet censorship), mail server delegation (e.g., to prevent email impersonation by attackers), CDN delegation (e.g., to prevent malicious CDNs from distributing content on behalf of websites which they are not supposed to distribute), and the delegation of third party certification authorities to issue certificates to websites ensuring their identities.