NYC*BUG next meeting: Secure RNGs

[NYC*BUG Announcements]

The April meeting will be a special event held at New York University on
TUESDAY, April 1, and NOT Suspenders.  In May, we will return to
Suspenders for our regularly scheduled meetings.  The meeting room will
fit up to 58 people, so spread the word.

****

April 1, Tuesday - Secure Random Number Generators, Yevgeniy Dodis
7:15 PM, NYU, Warren Weaver Hall (251 Mercer St)
WWH 101

* Abstract

We will discuss how to design (and not design) secure Random Number
Generators. In particular, we will show attacks on Linux /dev/random,
present first theoretical analysis on the Windows 8 RNG Fortuna, and
talk about the importance of provable security.

We will follow these papers:

http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/338
http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/167

Recent and relevant blog posts:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/03/the_security_of_7.html
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/insecurities_in.html
http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/10/14/2318211/linux-rng-may-be-insecure-after-all

* Speaker Bio

Yevgeniy Dodis is a Professor of computer science at New York
University. Dr. Dodis received his summa cum laude Bachelors degree in
Mathematics and Computer Science from New York University in 1996, and
his PhD degree in Computer Science from MIT in 2000. Dr. Dodis was a
post-doc at IBM T.J.Watson Research center in 2000, and joined New York
University as an Assistant Professor in 2001. He was promoted to
Associate Professor in 2007 and Full Professor in 2012.

Dr. Dodis' research is primarily in cryptography and network security.
In particular, he worked in a variety of areas including
leakage-resilient cryptography, cryptography under weak randomness,
cryptography with biometrics and other noisy data, hash function and
block cipher design, protocol composition and information-theoretic
cryptography. Dr. Dodis has more than 100 scientific publications at
various conferences, journals and other venues, was the Program co-Chair
for the 2015 Theory of Cryptography Conference, has been on program
committees of many international conferences (including FOCS, STOC,
CRYPTO and Eurocrypt), and gave numerous invited lectures and courses at
various venues.

Dr. Dodis is the recipient of National Science Foundation CAREER Award,
Faculty Awards from IBM, Google and VMware, and Best Paper Award at 2005
Public Key Cryptography Conference. As an undergraduate student, he was
also a winner of the US-Canada Putnam Mathematical Competition in 1995.