Bitcoin experts and CSE alumna wins Chancellor's Dissertation Medal

Sarah Meiklejohn, an alumna who earned a Ph.D. in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Jacobs School, has won the 2015 Chancellor's Dissertation Medal. She is now an assistant professor at University College, London.

Here is what Mihir Bellare, a professor in the department and her dissertation co-advisory had to say when outlining Meiklejohn's merits:

1. Impact: The results in Sarah’s thesis have shaped government policy. The methods in the thesis have been used to track cyber-criminals. The thesis has received significant media attention (NY Times, Washington Post, radio, TV, ...).
2. Intellectual and technical depth: The thesis introduces an innovative new experimental technique to track Bitcoins that was used not only to obtain the thesis results but is now used as a key forensic tool by law enforcement.
3. Independence: Unlike many theses, which write up group projects, this one was entirely Sarah’s work. She alone conceived the idea and methods and pushed it through from algorithms to reality.
In my 20 years of experience at UCSD, I would say that a thesis with one of the above elements is rare. To have all three in the same thesis is unique and extra-ordinary.

Read our story about Meiklejohn's work here. 

More media coverage of her work:

Forbes 

The Economist

Wired

MIT Technology Review

KPBS

Deciphering CSE's Upcoming Presence at Crypto 2014

CSE professors Mihir Bellare and Daniele Micciancio will be in Santa Barbara August 17-21 for the 34th International Cryptology Conference at UC Santa Barbara. The conference is sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), and the general chair of the conference is CSE alumna Alexandra (Sasha) Boldyreva (Ph.D. ’04), who worked in Bellare’s lab and is now an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s Information Security Center.

This year’s IACR Distinguished Lecture will be given by UC San Diego’s Bellare (pictured at left). The title of his talk: “Caught in between theory and practice.”  “This talk explores the culture and motivations of the cryptographic research community,” explains Bellare. “I examine the tension between theory and practice through the lens of my own experience in moving between them. I examine the peer-review process through the lens of psychology and sociology. In both cases the aim is to go from critique to understanding and, eventually, change.”

Bellare also has two other papers at Crypto 2014. In the August 18 opening session, he and colleagues Kenneth G. Paterson (University of London) and Phillip Rogaway (UC Davis) have a paper on "Security of Symmetric Encryption against Mass Surveillance." According to its authors, the research was “motivated by revelations concerning population-wide surveillance of encrypted communications.” In the paper, Bellare and colleagues formalize and investigate the resistance of symmetric encryption schemes to mass surveillance. The research abstract notes that, “We assume that the goal of ‘Big Brother’ is undetectable subversion,” going on to spell out a way to defend against so-called algorithm-substitution attacks (ASAs), which aim to replace a real encryption algorithm with a subverted encryption algorithm.

Separately, Bellare and his postdoc (Viet Tung Hoang), and Ph.D. student Sriram Keelveedhi teamed on a paper called, "Cryptography from Compression Functions: The UCE Bridge to the ROM." UCE stands for Universal Computational Extractor, and ROM is the Random Oracle Model.

Then on August 19, in a session on lattices, Micciancio (at right) and his French postdoc Léo Ducas have a paper on “Improved Short Lattice Signatures in the Standard Model.” They will present “a signature scheme provably secure in the standard model (no random oracles) based on the worst-case complexity of approximating the Shortest Vector Problem in ideal lattices within polynomial factors” – achieving short signatures (consisting of a single lattice vector), and “relatively short” public keys.