CS postdoctoral student Viet Tung Hoang and collaborators receive best student paper award at ACM CCS

Viet Tung Hoang, who is currently a postdoc in the cryptography laboratory at UCSB, and his co-authors, Professor Jonathan Katz and Ph.D student Alex Malozemoff (University of Maryland), received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2015 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) taking place in Denver, CO. CCS is one of the top-tier conferences in the broad area of computer and network security.

Their paper, entitled Automated analysis and synthesis of authenticated encryption schemes, studies how to use programming-language techniques to generate secure and fast authenticated-encryption schemes, a cryptographic tool underneath many Internet protocols, such as HTTPS.  The team developed a system to browse through millions of possible designs, returning thousands of novel, provably secure modes and generating explicit attacks on others. Among the new candidates, they found some schemes as fast as OCB, the best (but unfortunately patented) mode in the literature, and significantly faster than CCM and GCM, the current standards.

The paper can be found here.