Keeping authorities honest with verifiable append-only logs, and making backdoored software updates detectable

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• Mustafa Al Bassam, Department of Computer Science, University College London (UCL)
• Tuesday 29 January 2019, 14:00-15:00
• LT2, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Alexander Vetterl.

Transparency is important in services that rely on authoritative information, as it provides a robust mechanism for holding authorities accountable for their actions, or making those actions publicly auditable. A number of solutions have emerged in recent years that provide public auditability in the setting of public key infrastructure (such as certificate and key transparency), and cryptocurrencies provide an example of how to allow for public verifiability in a financial setting.

In this seminar, we explore the technical mechanisms for building transparent, auditable or verifiable systems, including verifiable data structures, append-only logs and blockchains. We discuss how such systems can provide extra security assurances to users in the context of compelled software backdoors (e.g. via the Investigatory Powers Act), by enforcing transparency mechanisms in software distribution.

This talk is part of the Computer Laboratory Security Seminar series.

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