Professor Rafail Ostrovsky: A More Secure Internet

In February 2011 the Computer Science Department received a $2.6M grant from DARPA/ONR to study the mathematical interplay between two-party and multi-party secure protocols, coding theory including probabilistically checkable proofs, and other cryptographic primitives.    The effort, Novel Foundations of Advanced Security (N-FAST), is headed up by Professor Rafail Ostrovsky, who is also the director of the department’s Center for Information & Computational Security (CICS). 

Professor Ostrovsky is a well-known leader in the world of cryptography and has gathered a team of highly qualified researchers for the N-FAST effort. The research team will work with security technologies that prove good behavior without violating privacy, including a win-win approach that builds efficient verification protocols. The impact of the research will be the establishment of novel mathematical structures and insights to bring about significant improvements in the mathematical foundations and future capabilities of national cyber security.