Foteini Baldimtsi, Assistant Professor, Computer Science, received funding from the National Science Foundation for the project: "Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: Cryptographic accumulators and revocation of credentials."
The goal of the project is to design efficient revocation mechanisms for the Web PKI and beyond.
Baldimtsi and her collaborators will tailor cryptographic accumulators to the problem of credential revocation making certificate revocation mechanisms more practical and leading to their wider use.
The researchers will focus on improved practicality and wider use of revocation mechanisms for TLS certificates in the Web PKI.
A TLS certificate is a digital object that allows systems to verify the identity and subsequently establish an encrypted network connection to another system using the Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) protocol.
The Web PKI is a web-based component that supports documents' digital signing, signature verification, and document encryption.
Beyond TLS, the researchers will focus on revocation in code-signing PKI by deploying batching and aggregation techniques on cryptographic accumulators to allow for more efficient software validity checks.
They will also address privacy issues during revocation and will propose solutions that can safeguard the privacy of users in Internet of Things connected communities.
Finally, they will examine and address post-quantum security.
Baldimtsi received $239,970 from NSF for this research. Funding began in May 2023 and will end in late April 2026.