Alan Mislove
Northeastern University, MA·Computer Science
Logging into a bank, shopping online, or installing a software update all depend on digital certificates. These are electronic credentials that prove a website or program is who it claims to be.
- Fields
Computer Science
Engineering
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
cryptography
cryptographic accumulators
certificate revocation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Design revocation schemes for TLS certificates in the Web Public Key Infrastructure based on cryptographic accumulators, compact summaries of large sets, to make certificate revocation more practical and far-reaching.
- Speed up software validity checks in code-signing PKI by applying batching and aggregation techniques, which combine many checks or proofs into one, to cryptographic accumulators.
- Develop privacy-preserving methods for checking certificate revocation that protect users in Internet-of-Things connected communities, including constructions with post-quantum security.
- Implement all proposed accumulator protocols, compare them with existing revocation techniques, and integrate prototypes into real systems to measure real-world performance.
More about the research
When a certificate is stolen, lost, or held by an owner who turns malicious, it must be revoked, meaning cancelled, quickly and reliably. Today's revocation methods on the web are often slow, costly, or leak information about what users are doing. This project asks how to make revocation efficient, private, and practical at Internet scale.
Why it matters
Faster and more private certificate revocation could make everyday web activities such as banking, shopping, and messaging safer when credentials are stolen or misused. Faster checks on whether software is genuine could help protect users from tampered code. Privacy-preserving checks could help IoT-connected communities. The underlying cryptographic tools may also help with blockchain scalability and secure cloud computing.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Nikolay Ivanov
Rowan University, NJ·Computer Science
Conduct a two-stage human-subjects study to identify usability problems across the lifecycle of self-sovereign digital identities (SSDIs), systems in which users control their own identity data.
Jiayu Xu
Oregon State University, OR·Computer Science
Re-analyze real-world asymmetric password-authenticated key exchange (aPAKE) protocols, which let a client prove a password without the server storing it, to test whether their contrived security definitions are necessary or whether standard notions suffice.
Jason LeGrow
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Computer Science
Construct post-quantum blind signatures, threshold signatures and multisignatures based on lattices, error-correcting codes and group actions such as isogenies, maps between elliptic curves.
The school
Northeastern University: 27 labs on PI Pages, $347M a year on research, 251 research doctorates a year.
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