Group Meeting - Identity Based Cryptography

Today's meeting was about Identity Based Cryptography. Basically, it's a way to do public-key cryptography using someone's identity as their public key -- their actual public key. The idea is that an identity is well known, so it eliminates the problem of distributing public keys to everyone.

You take your identity and give it to a Key Creation Center (or something like that), over a secure channel, and it does some magic with its private key, and gives you your private key. Then, anyone can use you identity and run it through a public function to determine your public key. This means that you pay the one time connection cost of the KCC creating your private key, and you can recover everyone else's public keys from their identity. This reduces the problem of getting someone's public key to knowing their identity. In most cases, the identity would be an email address. This is really cool if it works, since getting public keys for people that you want to communicate with is one of the steps in a PKI (private key infrastructure) that would require a round trip time (RTT), which is expensive in a disconnected network.

Prof. Keshav Meeting - Initial notes

I had a meeting with Prof. Keshav early in the project to bring me up to speed. This is basically what I got out of it.

Goals:

• Disconnection Tolerant
• Mobility Transparent
• Identity Management

Scenarios of Connectivity:

• Rural health clinic (no connectivity/deep region)
• Mobile medical worker moving between zones / home visitation (near/far connectivity)
• In a hospital with covered and uncovered regions (near connectivity)

Applications:

• Consultation with expert
• Upload/download notes
• Vector monitoring (spread of disease to new region)
• Epidemic monitoring

Task:

• Requirements
  • Performance
  • Security
  • Availability
  • User experience / ease of use
• required changes to existing architecture

Mindstream Healthcare Application Project

Hi all; My name is Jeremy, and this is my mindstream project blog. I am going to detail my experiences with the Mindstream Project here. Mindstream is a framework for accessing resources in a fully disconnected network. Read the project page to get an idea of how it works, I don't fully understand it yet myself. The project started as a way to maintain a blog without a constant connection to the network and is being expanded to other applications.

I am responsible for determining the requirements and specification for the project's heath-care application. The idea is that a heath-care provider wants to have access to network resources in a disconnected environment. For example, they may want to take notes about a patient and have those notes automatically synchronize with an on-line database whenever the provider reestablishes a connection to the network. The system must be disconnect tolerant and transparent to the user. Another application is to use mobile access points to synchronize data between fully disconnected nodes and the network over wireless connections.

I have been hired as an Undergraduate Research Assistant (URA) in the University of Waterloo's School of Computer Science, working under Prof. Keshav. His project blog is here.

All project blogs