NOTE: This CAREER award is a companion project to the CAREER award CCR-96-24439, ``Cryptography, Proof Checking and Approximation'', University of California, San Diego. This project focuses on the new area of provable security. Provable security is achieved for a problem, when one provides (i) a definition of security for the problem, (ii) a protocol, and (iii) a proof that the protocol meets its definition, assuming, for example, the intractability of factoring. Instead of just producing triples (definition, protocol, proof), the goal of the project is to utilize reductions as a technique for making precise statements about the security of concrete cryptographic schemes; for example, ``if you can break authentication protocol P with resources X, then you can break the Data Encryption Standard with resources Y''. In particular, applications of these techniques have already lead to a treatment of asymmetric encryption, message authentication, entity authentication, and key distribution. Protocols designed employing practice oriented provable security have resulted in protocols used in products of IBM and Microsoft, and in a proposed International Standard. The Integrated Educational Plan of this CAREER Grant includes developing (a) a new graduate course in modern cryptography; (b) undergraduate security projects which are difficult, open-ended, and design oriented; (c) course and course materials for a new undergraduate course in graphs, games and coloring.***
