Security, Cryptography and Privacy Track in PODC 2003: Tutorials and (updated) CFP

[Amir Herzberg]

Dear Colleagues,

Please note that the deadline for submitting to PODC 2003, and in 
particular to the special track on Security in Distributed Computing, is 
rapidly approaching - Jan 31, 2003. This event is an excellent opportunity 
for interaction between the security, cryptography and distributed 
computing communities, and I hope many of you will send excellent 
submissions and of course participate. PODC will be held on Sunday July 
13th - Wednesday July 16th, 2003, in
Boston, Massachusetts.

The registration fee includes two interesting pre-conference tutorials on 
Sunday, July 13. Both are on very active areas in security in distributed 
computing: Incentives and Internet Computation by Joan Feigenbaum and Scott 
Shenker, and
Content Protection Technologies by Jeffrey B. Lotspiech, Tushar Chandra, 
and Donald E. Leake Jr..
Abstracts are included below, and can also be found, with bios of the 
speakers, from the webpage: http://www.podc.org/podc2003

Expect lively discussion on these and other issues related to security and 
privacy in distributed systems, following these tutorials, as well as our 
very special invited speakers on security: Ross Anderson (U. of Cambridge), 
Butler Lampson (Microsoft), and Silvio Micali (MIT), all of which are known 
for their sometimes conflicting but always interesting views.

This year, PODC will also feature a series of lectures illustrating and 
celebrating the impact of the work of Michael Fischer, in honor of his 
sixtieth birthday, by: Leslie Lamport, Microsoft, Nancy Lynch, MIT, Albert 
Meyer, MIT, and Rebecca Wright, Stevens Inst. of Tech.. Topics are not 
announced yet but considering the speakers, I am sure these presentations 
will also be of interest to crypto/security folks.

So, please participate and submit and encourage others to do so; e.g. 
please post the CFP in relevant forums. PODC especially encourages student 
participation, and a prize will be given to the best student paper; we may 
be able also to partially sponsor some of the students participating and 
presenting, depending on budget.

PODC'03 received generous support from Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. If 
you are interested in making additional contributions, possibly for 
sponsoring a specific purpose, please contact the general chair, Elizabeth 
Borowsky, borowsky at cs.bc.edu (Boston College).

Looking forward to your submissions and to see you in PODC 2003!

Amir Herzberg
http://amir.herzberg.name


>Content Protection Technologies
>Jeffrey B. Lotspiech, Tushar Chandra, Donald E. Leake Jr.
>
>Abstract
>
>The entertainment industry is in the midst of a digital revolution,
>the growth of which seems only limited by concerns about the
>unauthorized redistribution of perfect copies that digital technology
>enables.  Several content protection technologies have been deployed
>already in consumer electronic devices, and more are in the works.  In
>the near future, the average person's encounter with cryptography
>will not be restricted to access to ATM machines, but will include his
>TV, his stereo, and his home entertainment network.  We trace the
>history of digital content protection technologies, starting with Copy
>Generation Management System found on Digital Audio Tape, to the
>Content Scrambling System used on DVD video, and moving on to more
>cryptographically sound technologies like Digital Transmission Content
>Protection used on the IEEE digital 1394 bus, and Content Protection
>for Recordable Media used on DVD Audio, DVD video recorders, and the
>Secure Digital Memory Card.  It turns out that the relatively new area
>of cryptography called broadcast encryption has found an enthusiastic
>acceptance in content protection applications.  In fact, the content
>protection application has inspired recent theoretical advances in
>this area.
>
>One newly-defined problem in content protection is called "authorized
>domains".  The idea is that the consumer's extended home becomes a
>domain in which content can be copied and moved without restriction.
>The consumer only encounters technical obstacles when he/she tries to
>widely redistribute the copyrighted content.  This requires that the
>entertainment devices in the home, which may be only intermittently
>connected, act as a distributed system to agree upon common
>cryptographic keys.  Although public-key systems can provide this
>function, it turns out that broadcast encryption can also work in this
>application, and has some intriguing advantages.
>
>However, not all content protection is based on cryptography.  We
>discuss signal-processing based technologies like MacroVision and
>digital watermarking.  Our view is that cryptography and signal-based
>technologies are not competitors, but instead complement each
>other.  Cryptographic solutions should dominate while the content
>remains in the digital domain.  Once the content is rendered in
>analogue form for viewing or listening, signal processing takes over,
>to provide the last line of defense.
>
>As technologists we would like to think that content protection is
>fundamentally about solving the technical problems, but we have come
>to realize that is actually the lawyers, not engineers, that have the
>tougher job.  A complete content protection solution is mainly about
>licensing, not about the technology.  The technology acts as the
>licensing "hook".  It is the license that the manufacturer signs to,
>for example, obtain keys to play a DVD audio, that obligates him to
>build devices that obey the copying rules.  In an ideal world, all the
>licenses for all the different copy protection schemes interlock to
>form a chain of license obligations, from the original source down to
>the final rendering in the user's home.
>
>----------------------------
>
>Incentives and Internet Computation
>Joan Feigenbaum and Scott Shenker
>
>Traditional treatments of distributed computation typically assume
>nodes to be either cooperative (i.e., they execute the prescribed
>algorithm) or Byzantine (i.e., they can act in an arbitrary fashion).
>However, to properly model the Internet, in which distributed
>computation and autonomous agents prevail, one must also consider
>selfish agents that maximize their own utility.  To cope with selfish
>agents, system designers must develop mechanisms in which cooperation
>is in each agent's self-interest; we call such mechanisms
>incentive-compatible.  This tutorial will first introduce the
>computer-science audience to the economic theory that forms the basis
>for the design and analysis of incentive-compatible Internet
>algorithms.  It will then review previous results in this area,
>including those on interdomain routing and multicast cost sharing.
>Finally, it will present several promising research directions and
>pose some specific open problems.


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