[Colloquium] Adam Smith talk - Thurs. 12:15 at TTI

[Meridel Trimble]

TOYOTA TECHNOLOGICAL INSTITUTE TALK 

Speaker: Adam Smith
MIT

Speaker’s homepage: http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~asmith/

Time: 12:15pm
Date: Thursday, March 2nd, 2004
Place: TTI-C (1427 E. 60th St., 2nd Floor– The University Press Building)
LUNCH PROVIDED

Title: Fuzzy Extractors: How to Generate Strong Keys from Biometrics and Other 
Noisy Data

Abstract: 
 
We provide formal definitions and efficient techniques for 

1. turning biometric information into keys usable for any cryptographic application 

2. reliably and securely authenticating biometric data. 

Our techniques apply not just to biometric information, but to any key material
that, unlike traditional cryptographic keys, is (a) not reproducible precisely
and (b) not distributed uniformly. 

We propose two primitives: a *fuzzy extractor* extracts nearly uniform
randomness R from its biometric input; the extraction is error-tolerant in the
sense that R will be the same even if the input changes, as long as it remains
reasonably close to the original. Thus, R can be used as a key in any
cryptographic application. A *secure sketch* produces public information about
its input W that does not reveal W, and yet allows exact recovery of W given
another value that is close to W. Thus, it can be used to reliably reproduce
error-prone biometric inputs without incurring the security risk inherent in
storing them. 

In addition to formally introducing our new primitives, we provide constructions
of both primitives for various measures of ``closeness'' of 
input data, such as Hamming distance, edit distance, and set difference. 

I'll also discuss recent extensions to this work, which focus on stronger
measures of privacy. 

Joint work with Yevgeniy Dodis (NYU) and Leonid Reyzin (Boston U). 

The talk is partly based on a paper that will appear in Eurocrypt 2004. A
preliminary version is available at: 
http://eprint.iacr.org/2003/235

If you have questions, or would like to meet the speaker, please contact Meridel
at (773) 834-9873 or mtrimble at tti-c.org
 
For information on future TTI-C talks or events, please go to the TTI-C Events 
page: http://www.tti-c.org/events.shtml